Latest News
new lectures online for ceus FEB 3, 2011
Pam's new lecture, "Carryover Techniques", and a new three-hour version of her popular workshop "Frontal Lisp, Lateral Lisp" are now available online for ASHA CEU's.
On January 31, 2011, Pam recorded two seminars with Advanced Healthcare Education in Salem, Oregon. The classes were broadcast live to hundreds of speech-language pathologists who were signed up to take the course.
The classes are now available on AHCE's website and can be taken online, together or separately. An overview of the lectures can also be found here. These lectures were presented by AHCE along with Marshalla Speech & Language for several school districts at once; one school watched live as others watched online.
Any school, clinic, hospital, university or other organization that is interested in banding with other organizations and working with AHCE and MSL to bring CEU's to their SLP's should contact Advanced Healthcare Education for more information.
new book in the works JAN 12, 2011
Pam is working on a new book to be called "The Marshalla Guide to 21st Century Articulation Therapy."
A LETTER FROM PAM
This guide has been written in the tradition of Van Riper who wrote what he believed to be true combined with the little bit of research that had been done in his time. Many professionals refer to Van Riper as the Father of Articulation Therapy. I have studied every edition of Van Riper's classic book called Speech Correction: Principles and Methods -- from 1939 through 1996 -- and I have read his other textbooks as well. To the uninitiated, it can be a shock to discover that Van Riper's books are not based on laboratory research for the most part. Instead, Van Riper wrote about his observations, his insights, his clinical experiences, his intuitions, his plans, his procedures, his methods, his clinical judgments, and his clinical expectations. Most of these volumes are one therapist's opinion about how to do therapy, or two therapists' opinions when he worked with a co-writer. And, of course, he always acknowledged that his wife had as much to do with the writing of these books as he did but "refuses to allow her name to appear as co-author" (Van Riper, 1939, p. v).
Van Riper would have been appalled to know that some young therapists today are being taught that they cannot do in therapy anything that has not been researched. Egads! Van Riper never said anything of the sort. He never even hinted at it. He said that we must think on our feet, experiment, engage in trial-and-error, and create new procedures of our own. My three decades of clinical experience have revealed to me that what Van Riper taught was true. Most of what we do in therapy we make up ourselves according to our scientific understanding. This is what therapy is.
Van Riper was a clinician's clinician, and he was supportive of others who wrote clinical material. The great man himself wrote to me personally on the topic of writing about therapy, in the mid-1980's, when he was ordering a subscription to my clinical newsletter. He said that the profession was getting far too over-focused on research -- "It is as if we are spending all our time counting the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin." He strongly encouraged me to continue writing about my personal clinical experiences. He said we needed more people writing about the techniques they were developing and using. He emphasized that clinicians need to read what each other are doing. He also stressed that researchers needed to read what clinicians have to say because it is in the clinic where new research lines are born.
It is because of Van Riper's letter to me that I always have written about the processes of therapy. This guide represents my perspective of articulation and phonological therapy for clients of all ages and ability levels, from those with mild single-phoneme errors to those who are non-vocal. It includes a cornucopia of ideas from a vast array of resources, both clinical and research-based.
Pam Marshalla, MA, CCC-SLP
Speech-Language Pathologist
