DEVELOPMENTAL LANGUAGE DISORDER DAY 2020

On the occasion of last year’s Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) Awareness Day on October 16th 2020, the ESRs Maren Eikerling and Theresa Bloder organized a virtual Lunch-Time Talk on the topic of multilingualism and DLD. The aim was to provide information about the disorder and to offer a platform for interdisciplinary exchange among professionals from different disciplines (speech therapists, educators, teachers, etc.), parents of affected children, and anyone with a particular interest in the topic.

Furthermore, the two ESRs created an informational brochure on this topic to draw even more attention to the widespread but among the general public little addressed problem of language acquisition. The goal is to provide the general public with evidence based information and to raise awareness of DLD especially in the multilingual population. The brochure targets parents, teachers and clinical staff alike and besides information on the difficulties of adequately assessing/ detecting DLD in multilingual children provides tips on how to support and promote healthy multilingual language acquisition.

Since October 2020, the materials have been translated to 6 languages (German, English, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, and Polish) and are available on the Multimind website. We’d like to thank everyone who was involved in the translation process, especially Sofía González Castro (Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków), Aylin Öybey (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), and Aleksandra Syczewska (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg).

If you want to get involved in translating the brochure to yet another language, please feel free to reach out to the ESRs.