The Language, Poverty, and Culture Training Grant (Master's student support)

Overview

The Language, Poverty and Culture (LPC) Project is a four-year project that was recently funded in August of 2003. The LPC Project is funded through a training grant from the Office of Special Education, U.S. Department of Education.

The LPC Project enhances the current speech language pathology training specialization at The University of Texas at Austin. Students who participate in the LPC Project will be involved in cutting edge clinical practices that are data driven and will obtain clinical research experiences with children from backgrounds of poverty.

Project Goals

The LPC project provides students with:

knowledge in current findings
opportunities to use acquired knowledge and skills in schools serving children from backgrounds of poverty
research-based clinical activities
training on how to collaborate with regular and special education teachers, and provide in-service training to other professionals.

LPC Project Competencies

The LPC Project is designed to strengthen and improve the competencies of students in order that they may better serve children with communication disorders who come from backgrounds of poverty. The project has training in three areas: academic, clinical, and professional training designed to address competencies that focus on language, poverty and culture issues.

Students will participate in field-practicum experiences that focus on assessment and intervention with children and clinical efficacy in service delivery to children from poverty backgrounds.

Specialization Courses

Students participating in the Project will enroll in two specialization courses:

Children and Poverty (or a comparable elective course)
Collaborative Models of Assessment and Intervention for Bilingual Children

Project Commitments

Students selected to participate in the LPC Project will be expected to commit to the following training requirements:

Attend weekly student/faculty meetings
Participate in academic, clinical practicum, and clinical research 10 hours a week
Enroll in the required specialized courses
Comply with the U.S. Department of Education “pay back” requirement. Each student must complete two years of employment in an educational setting for each year of funding.
Student must be a U.S. citizen or resident.

Project Activities

Students who participate in the LPC Project will have opportunities to gain clinical and research skills while working on the following Project activities:

Community-based activities with children of poverty backgrounds (e.g., volunteering, tutoring)
Language Test Development for Spanish-English Bilinguals
Dynamic Assessment
Grammatical Deficits in Specific Language Impairment in Spanish-speaking Children

Student Funding

Students are invited to apply for participation in the specialized sequenced Project. Interested students may apply for funding in the form of a tuition/fees and book stipend. All students must complete the LPC Project Application for Funding by the required deadlines.

Faculty

Elizabeth Peña, Ph.D.

Dr. Peña is director of the LPC Project. She conducts research in the areas of dynamic assessment applied to bilingual (Spanish and English) preschool children. She is Co-Principal Investigator of a project funded by the National institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders to develop and validate a language test for Hispanic children speaking non-standard English.

lizp@mail.utexas.edu

Lisa Bedore, Ph.D.

Dr. Bedore is co-director of the LPC Project. She has research interests in the areas of child language and phonological development and disorders with a special interest in Spanish-speaking children. Her current research projects focus on morphological development in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment and in typically developing children.

lbedore @mail.utexas.edu

Anita M. Perez, Ph.D.

Dr. Perez is coordinator of the LPC Project. Her interests are in the areas of early childhood intervention, bilingual special education, and Spanish/English literacy issues. She has extensive experience working with infants and toddlers and school age children from bilingual (Spanish and English) and poverty backgrounds. Dr. Perez also serves several school districts on a consultant basis.

anitaperez@mail.utexas.edu