About the Program

The Bilingual MA-SLP Certificate Program provides specialized training for current OSU MA-SLP students who wish to serve bilingual and multilingual populations. Through coursework, clinical practicum, and a capstone experience, students develop culturally responsive assessment and intervention skills. The certificate enhances career readiness for bilingual clinical roles. 

Why Complete the Bilingual Certificate?

• Multilingual clients are now part of nearly every SLP caseload, whether the SLP is bilingual or not! In an ASHA survey of more than 200 SLPs,
• 100% report having at least one multilingual client,
• 40% report that more than one third of their clients are multilingual, and
• 25% report that at least half of their current caseload consists of multilingual clients.
• At the same time, only 8.5% of SLPs in health care self-identify as multilingual service providers, and
• 70% of these providers report that there are more job openings than job seekers in their settings.
• Nearly one in three SLPs (29%) report they cannot comply with their organizational policies for providing services to culturally and linguistically diverse clients because of limited access to interpreters and multilingual colleagues.
• The Bilingual MA-SLP Certificate is designed to prepare clinicians who can meet this demand and deliver the assessment and intervention practices that current evidence supports.
• Multilingual SLP involvement improves outcomes across pediatric and adult caseloads:

Aphasia recovery

• 100% of bilingual patients with primary progressive aphasia improve naming in both languages following multilingual anomia therapy; 70–80% demonstrate cross-linguistic transfer (Grasso et al., 2021).

Early literacy

• Following Spanish literacy interventions delivered by multilingual SLPs, 80% of first-grade dual language learners master age-level morphosyntax in both English and Spanish (Bedore et al., 2020).

Parent-mediated intervention

• When multilingual SLPs train parents to deliver intervention in the home language, 100% of parents report high satisfaction and triple the number of times they read with their children each week (Ijalba, 2015).

Clinician confidence

• Multilingual SLPs are more than twice as likely as monolingual SLPs to report confidence working with multilingual clients (57% vs. 24%) (Narayanan & Ramsdell, 2022).

Apply

Please review the Bilingual MA-SLP Certificate Program Advising Form. A link to the admissions form is available under the Required Forms section.