Guiding Parents From Diverse Cultural Backgrounds to Promote Language Skills in Preschoolers With Language Disorders: Two Challenges and Proposed Solutions for Them

In providing culturally sensitive services for the families of young children with language disorders, the SLP is often confronted with a set of challenges. The first relates to avoiding making assumptions about the communication practices of any particular family, and is called the “avoid stereotyping” challenge. The solution offered is to repurpose the routines-based interview that is becoming more widely used in early intervention services (e.g., Bernheimer & Weisner, 2007; McWilliam, 2012; McWilliam, Casey, & Sims, 2009) in order to help the SLP determine (in a nonjudgmental fashion) the frequency and specific nature of interactions that occur in the home. When families do not display interaction patterns that evidence suggests foster language development and school success, how does the SLP both value the family's preferred practices and offer suggestions for interaction that may contradict them? The solution offered for this challenge, referred to as the “avoiding mixed messages” challenge, is to ta...