The Benefits of Multilingual Therapy
What are the benefits of multilingual therapy? How do bilingual therapists evaluate dual language learners? How can bilingual therapists communicate with families speaking only one language? Therapeutic approaches are always evolving in order to meet the needs of a culturally diverse world — and multicultural therapists are in high demand.
Therapy Smarts is proud to support a diverse team of multilingual therapists, able to address a variety of needs for our community.
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The Rise of Multilingual Therapy
Communities across the globe are becoming more linguistically diverse. Furthermore, there is a growing rise in interest surrounding caregiver involvement throughout the therapeutic process. In this environment, having a therapist able to communicate impactfully with children and their support systems provides a range of benefits.
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Benefits of Multilingual Therapy
Communication is one of the most important keys to successful therapy, across disciplines. Here are some of the ways that multilingual therapy is able to help children with a range of unique needs:
- Accurate Diagnoses: Having a therapist able to effectively understand a child, such as through a speech therapy evaluation, makes it easier to effectively discern and diagnose unique conditions.
- Communication with Caregivers: To be effective, the skills learned in therapy must be practiced outside of the clinical session. However, for families where English is not the primary language, it can be difficult to ensure that skills are carried over.
- Support for Dual Language Learners: Bilingual therapists can help dual language learners to foster cognitive flexibility as they swap between languages.
- Cultural Sensitivity: Therapists with a cultural background similar to their patients and families can bring a deeper understanding of external cultural factors that can help foster a more effective therapeutic relationship.
Wondering About Developmental Milestones?
Have questions about your child’s development, or wondering if a certain diagnosis may be a fit? Try out our developmental screening tool— it’s a fast, free way to get a snapshot of your child’s progress on his or her developmental milestones.
If you’re looking to schedule an evaluation for your bilingual child, we’ve got you covered. For speech therapy evaluations, we evaluate in all spoken languages. This ensures a more accurate diagnosis — and can determine if your child is simply mastering dual language learning, or facing a genuine speech delay.