Supporting multilingual children with language impairment in a multilingual environment: experience and perspectives from speech and language therapists in Switzerland

Abstract

This work reports the results of a survey study conducted with French-, German-, and Italian-speaking speech and language therapists (SLTs) in Switzerland. In this survey we asked respondents about their language background, training in multilingual matters, and practices with multilingual patients, as well as their opinions on the current SLT provisions for multilingual children in Switzerland. The main results showed that despite high levels of SLT multilingualism in Switzerland, there is often a mismatch between the additional languages spoken by the SLTs and the heritage languages spoken by their patients. To circumvent the challenges of assessing a multilingual child, SLTs across Switzerland reported using a variety of assessment tools and methods, although therapeutic options are still missing. The results also revealed some differences based on linguistic region, with SLTs working in French-speaking region having the highest number of multilingual caseloads but those working in the German-speaking region receiving the most training on multilingualism. Conclusions drawn are that across Switzerland there is still a need for SLTs to be better trained to work with multilingual children and for suitable tools for assessing and especially treating multilingual patients to be developed. Full results are reported and discussed.