3.3 How does Devin use Spanish at work?
Devin Lukachik and Whitney Chappell
Devin’s job is clearly impactful, improving health outcomes and changing the lives of people dealing with numerous conditions. The next question I had for Devin is how he uses Spanish at work. Why is speaking Spanish an important skill for an SLP?
Transcript: “Within the field of speech pathology, unfortunately, it’s historically a field that lacks a lot of cultural diversity, so the most recent data that we have show that 91% of SLPs are white, and we only really have 2% of SLPs that speak Spanish at a level that allows them to treat patients in their native language, and, from my perspective, when I go to treat patients in the hospital, we have a caseload that is about 75% Spanish speaking because we’re a level one trauma center that flies in really severe injuries from Mexico and the border and the valley, even as far as Honduras, and so with these patients, there has to be a holistic approach to their communication disorder. These disorders are intrinsically based in language and you can’t really extract the language that they speak from the treatment of that language, and so having a background in Spanish linguistics and also a cultural understanding of different aspects of the language and also in terms of swallowing, the cultural significance of being able to eat and the social aspect of eating in Hispanic culture, all of these things are so important, and you just don’t get that same level of treatment going in and working with an interpreter, for instance. And so, we’re a field that desperately lacks bilingual service providers, and it’s a field that has a shortage anyways, so you’ll never really be without a job or have a hard time finding a job, but if you’re bilingual, you can really get some of the best opportunities out there.”
One barrier that monolingual SLPs run into frequently is in completing an evaluation of a speech, language, or cognitive communication disorder with a non-English speaking client. To use cognitive communication as an example, in the hospital setting SLPs routinely evaluate patients with suspected cognitive impairments either from dementia, traumatic brain injury, encephalopathy, or certain types of stroke. In doing so, they use standardized, norm-referenced cognitive assessments that are able to fairly and accurately show the degree of impairment in various cognitive domains. Of course, nearly all of these assessments are standardized in English. They can be used with a non-English speaking client but not reported as standard scores because there are cultural differences at work. The issue is, if a monolingual SLP tries to administer one of these assessments with an interpreter (or a nearby family member, which is unfortunately even more common), certain aspects of the assessment just don’t work anymore. These assessments have very specific types of questions and specific cues SLPs can provide so as not to give away too much information, which would invalidate the test. Having family members interpret is especially problematic because they tend to help their loved one by either giving extra information away, cueing too much, or modifying the translated response in a way that benefits their loved one’s score. Only a bilingual SLP is capable of administering an assessment like this accurately.
While cognitive assessments are just one specific example, there are so many circumstances in which this holds true, whether it be an assessment of language, speech, or stuttering. When SLPs are assessing aspects of language, the language someone speaks simply can’t be extracted from the test. Furthermore, once the assessment is completed it is an SLP’s role to treat the disorder, which means doing so in the client’s language. They also never treat a speech or language disorder in just English if the client is bilingual, meaning SLPs are either left to do their best with an interpreter (rarely adequate), or refer to a bilingual SLP that can better treat the client (hard to find). The point, in essence, is that speaking another language—particularly Spanish—can empower an SLP to make such a profound impact on people’s lives and progress that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
