Presentation for Dominic Barker Trust Open Evening

Dr Jan McAllister

School of Allied Health Professions

University of East Anglia

Thank you for this opportunity to talk briefly about the Speech & Language Therapy programme at UEA, and to say a little bit about the research environment of Dominic Barker Research Studentship.

I am one of the two course directors for the BSc (Hons) in Speech & Language Therapy. The fact that there are two directors for this course reflects in part the newness of our course, which only took its first intake of students in September 2004, and also the diversity of the subject matter that underpins a degree in speech and language therapy.

I will tell you about my own research background in a moment, but I can’t miss this opportunity to mention our degree, of which we are very proud. It is attracting an impressive number of applicants each year, and we have been able to adopt some ground-breaking approaches to our students’ learning, including a method of curriculum delivery called Problem-Based Learning, and also a new perspective on placement-based learning called Conversation Partners. You may have seen coverage of our Conversation Partners work recently in the local press. Our students go out weekly to visit people with communication problems, and have conversations with them; our students learn a great deal about communication disorders by doing this, and at the same time provide an important service in the community.

I am not a clinician. My background is in speech and language sciences, and my interest in stuttering grew out of my PhD research into psycholinguistics, which is concerned with the way that language is produced, understood and acquired. At the time when I did my PhD, most people were doing research into carefully constructed, very formal, almost artificial language, but I was more interested in what happens when we produce and comprehend ordinary conversational speech.

This led to my interest in disfluency, initially the ‘ums and ers’ that we all produce all the time in speaking, and then in turn in Disorders of Fluency. In my current research, I am working with Mary Kingston, a senior specialist in Disorders of Fluency who is based in Norwich, on a number of projects about disfluency and its effects speakers and also on listeners.

I could spend a long time telling you about my own research, but that is not why we are here this evening. Instead I would like to finish by acknowledging the importance of organisations like the Dominic Barker Trust in supporting solid, objective research into stuttering and approaches to its treatment. Without the support of organisations like the Trust, therapies would just be based on people’s intuitions about what might help a person who stutters to become fluent. I could give you lots of examples from early approaches to stuttering “therapy”, which now appear to us quite ridiculous and obviously doomed to failure, but I don’t want to steal Tammy’s thunder. I will just illustrate it with one example from another field of speech and language therapy. At one time, it was perfectly obvious to everyone that the way to treat aphasia, a communication problem that may result after brain injury, was to rub grease into the sufferer’s head and pour milk into both of their ears. We may laugh that people have been so foolish as to believe in such treatments in the past. But are such cases so very different from placing intuitive faith in any “therapy” that is not based on objective research?

The history of speech and language therapy is littered with ‘therapies’ that were at best of no use at all, and at worst an indignity or even a potential danger to people who suffered from disorders of communication. Nowadays when we train speech and language therapists we constantly emphasise the importance of evidence-based approaches to therapy; it is only by careful, objective research, which may challenge popular intuitions about the causes of and potential treatments for these conditions that we can improve the situation for those who suffer from disorders of communication.

So we are deeply indebted to organisations like the Dominic Barker Trust for funding research into disorders of communication, in this case, of course, stuttering. Without their support, and that of people like yourselves, we would still be in the dark ages as far as speech and language therapy is concerned, without the financial support we need to develop meaningful therapies based on objective research.