Banner image shows Marie Pinkstone demonstrating the UK developed speech assessment tool to a cohort of Master students from the Department of Communications at Dhaka University.

Continuing to build on our collaboration with the National Institute for Burns and Plastic Surgery cleft centre recently we have been working with the academic team and the Master students at the Department of Communication at Dhaka University to develop a speech assessment which will be used in the cleft centre with children and young people requiring detailed speech assessment.

When assessing speech a Speech and Language Therapist undertakes detailed percentual assessment using a sentence repetition task. The Speech and Language Therapist will transcribe the patient’s speech using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA ).

In Bangladesh the primary language is Bangla and the team were aware that we needed a culturally appropriate assessment tool including pictures and images which reflects the rich Bangladeshi culture.

The first step was to identify all the sounds within the Bangla language that we needed to assess, then with the Speech and Language Therapist based at the centre, the team generated a list of sentences with all the consonants in the required word positions such as at the beginning of a word.

The Masters Students from the Department of Communication at Dhaka University are now trailing the sentences to see if the assessment is robust and able to be undertaken by children of all ages.

As the sentences are being validated a picture book is being developed which will be used by the therapist to administer the assessment.

We are planning to return in Feb 25 to hear the feedback from the Masters Students and to review the final copies of the Assessment Picture Book.

The Impact of the support from CLEFT and the collaboration with the local Speech and Language Therapy Team and the Speech and Language Students enables children and young people to undergo speech assessment which is appropriate for their culture and language.

Marie Pinkstone MRCSLT