CELCIS professor partners with speech pathology students

CELCIS professor and master faculty specialist, Ila Baker, partnered with speech pathology students to help teach her A-S 3610 course in the spring 2017 semester. The partnership brought in speech and hearing science graduate student clinicians to asses and improve the English pronunciation of CELCIS students.

Professor Baker worked with the co-coordinators of the WMU Van Riper Language, Speech and Hearing Clinic, Kathy Hillenbrand and Heidi Vogley, to identify the graduate students who participated.

According to Professor Baker, the partnership has benefited both CELCIS students and the graduate clinicians in several ways.

“This collaboration serves to provide the graduate student clinicians with clinical practicum hours in their required area of work with diverse populations. It also provides the A-S 3610 students the one-on-one feedback and reinforcement needed to make substantial improvement in their English pronunciation in targeted areas.”

The classes took place during regularly scheduled class time for the clinician students, where they met with CELCIS students for 1.5 hours per week.

Emily Layman, a speech and hearing science graduate student, said that the experience has allowed her to work with individuals of many cultures.

“[The students] were linguistically diverse and all had different articulation errors and patterns. Teaching an entire class broadened my perspective on multiple different populations.” 

Story by: Korey Force and Mackenzie Adams