Good day. My name is Berna Gerber. I am a lecturer in
the Division of Speech-Language and Hearing Therapy at Stellenbosch University
and I am here to tell you more about the undergraduate course in Speech-Language and Hearing Therapy.
We assume that by the time you decide to follow a career in Speech-Language Therapy, you know what a
speech-language therapist does. I encourage you to continue to research about this profession,
to visit therapists, shadow them, etc.
For the purposes of this presentation, I will just briefly recap what a speech-language therapist does.
A speech therapist is a professional who assists in the promotion of normal communication, feeding, and swallowing.
They are also involved in the prevention, identification, assessment, and intervention
of a variety of communication disorders, as well as feeding and swallowing disorders.
When I say communication, we’re talking about speech, the sounds that you make to communicate;
we’re talking about language, your message,
the words that you do communicate; and then also hearing; and we are talking about
communication throughout the lifespan, from birth to the elderly population.
Because we use the same anatomy and physiology for speaking and communication as we do for
feeding and swallowing, speech and language therapists also work with feeding and swallowing
and treating disorders in feeding and swallowing across the lifespan.
Here I’ve given you a link to a website where you can read more about this should you be interested.
Then a very important note.
Please note, audiology and speech-language therapy are two separate professions. They exist independently of each other.
There are different degree courses that one takes to qualify you as either an audiologist or a speech-language therapist.
At Stellenbosch we only offer a course in Speech-Language Therapy.
If you wish to do Audiology and practice as an audiologist, the Speech-Language Therapy course is not for you.
But if you want to become a speech and language therapist, this is the course for you.
Where do speech-language therapists work?
We work across a variety of settings in health and in the education sectors. In health it’s clinics, hospitals,
rehabilitation centres in the public and the private spheres, private practices,
in schools, mainstream schools and schools for learners with special educational needs,
within communities, or then at universities if you lecture or do research, like myself.
What prospective students often want to know is about community service and what happens after
your degree course, also what the salary expectations are.
After you’ve completed your four-year degree course, you’ve passed all of the modules and the clinical practicals,
then you will be required to do a year of compulsory community service
before you can register as a speech-language therapist to practice independently.
This is for South African citizens.
After you graduate, you apply for community service through the Department of Health, the National Department of Health,
who administers the entire process.
You are then placed at a setting, a site where you will do your community service, and you are
paid for this first year of work, which is a lovely opportunity to get some work experience.
There are different benefits also attached to the community service post.
Usually there is an added rural allowance, so you are paid slightly more if you choose or select a rural placement.
There are other benefits like medical aid, a housing allowance, and sometimes the employees
can choose to have these benefits paid out to them to have a larger amount in cash at the end of each month.
There at the last bullet I’ve also listed the medical aid rates for speech and language therapy, the 2022 rates for you.
Just an important note also on the language of teaching and learning.
In the course, of course, we follow the university’s language policy and plan.
We have only one class group. We are between 35 and 45 students in the group, English and Afrikaans together.
During a lecture, all of the information will be conveyed in English with summaries or key concepts also given in Afrikaans,
if this is possible for the lecturer.
You may write your tests and exams in English or in Afrikaans, but on our clinical
training platform, we follow the language of the health facility and the client or the patient.
This is when we work at health settings or education settings with clients or patients.
Because we are a language profession, we value bilingualism and trilingualism.
In the Western Cape the dominant languages are English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa.
Throughout the course we try our best to equip students to be able to have basic conversations
with their patients in the patient’s language of choice and in the language of the health facility.
There’s a picture of our graduates, the class of 2019, before COVID struck, and then also our
2020 students at their graduation and how things have changed. But still our students are able
to graduate, to go out there and to work.
I’ll tell you a little bit more about the course now.
All of this information is from the yearbook, the university’s calendar.
I’ve given the links to you here if you want to revisit the information and read some more detail about it.
I’ll just highlight some aspects now.
In the first and second year, our students are mainly placed on Stellenbosch Campus. They reside in Stellenbosch.
Most of the lectures take place in Stellenbosch. They visit Tygerberg Campus once a week with
bus transport that we as a Department arrange for them, for which the cost is already included in the class fees.
So, that transport is not something you need to worry about.
In the first year, the modules that you will register for, and they’re listed in alphabetical order so
the Afrikaans and English doesn’t match per bullet,
but students do either Afrikaans Language Acquisition or isiXhosa, depending on their language levels.
Students who are isiXhosa first-language speakers or
very fluent in isiXhosa and have poor Afrikaans would be encouraged to rather do Afrikaans.
Then we also have General Linguistics, Information Skills, Clinical Speech Pathology,
which is the practical course where students observe and do some basic tasks with normal developing
young children to observe their communication development.
We also have modules in Psychology.
Then the modules that are particular to our profession, Speech Pathology.
There are modules in speech and hearing sciences, in human communication, articulation and phonology disorders,
and then also about basic audiometry.
And we have a course in Applied Anatomy and that is the module that students travel to Tygerberg Campus to attend.
There is a picture of our first-year class at the bus stop waiting for the bus to visit Tygerberg Campus once a week.
In the second year, students start working with clients or with patients.
They work at mainstream schools and they see particularly children with articulation or phonology disorders.
There are some of our past graduates at work in their second year.
The modules of the second year are Speech Pathology modules.
Those are modules in ethics and professional practice, in craniofacial disorders that are
cleft lip and/or palate disorders, a module on the prevention of communication disorders,
then a module that focuses on special populations, such as individuals with autism,
a course on voice disorders, and then also a year-long course on language disorders.
Then we have the clinical module which is where students do the practical work.
Again, General Linguistics and Psychology.
In the third year, students move to Tygerberg Campus. Here are pictures
of our students at their, the first one at a clinical practicum that is at a school,
and there on the other picture they are in front of the education building in Tygerberg
where most of the lecturing takes place. So, now students are situated on Tygerberg Campus.
The modules in the third year are Speech Pathology; a module that focuses on intervention
to people with hearing impairment; a module on intervention to people with fluency disorders,
such as stuttering; a module on research as a function of the speech and language therapist,
how we do research and how we use research; and then also a module on neurogenic communication disorders.
Those are communication disorders that result from a neurological injury,
such as after a person has suffered a stroke or a traumatic brain injury.
Then we also have Neuroanatomy and Clinical Neurology,
and Clinical Speech Pathology where students not only work in schools anymore, but also
a little bit of work in the health sector, working particularly with clients with voice disorders.
In the fourth year, the focus is on extended practicals in the urban and rural setting.
Here are pictures of our students at work on the Worcester Campus, which is the rural clinical school of the faculty.
Here they are presenting the research that they have performed throughout their fourth year.
Each fourth year is required to be part of a group that undertakes a research project, and then writes up the project
and also present it to an audience, usually of other speech and language therapists.
The modules of the fourth year usually takes place as intensive weeks.
The year starts with about six weeks of lecturing where students do modules in alternative and augmentative communication,
in swallowing disorders or dysphagia, and then we also have a course on advanced
seminars, advanced topics in the field.
After that theory has been completed,
students focus on the clinical module where they do practicals throughout the year in a
variety of settings, in health settings such as hospitals, clinics, community rehab settings,
urban, Tygerberg Hospital as well as rural, such as on the Worcester Campus, or students can also
apply to do some work in Upington. There’s also still work in the education sectors.
Here we really prepare you well for your work as a speech language therapist, and particularly so
that you can function independently as a community service therapist in the year after graduating.
Then, of course, there’s also the research project that runs throughout the year
and is concluded by about October of the year.
This is the information about the course. I wish you very well on your journey and
I invite you to contact me or anyone else in the division if you have any specific questions.
The Admin Division at the Faculty will also be very helpful in terms of the selection process and so on.
I wish you well for your schoolwork and the rest of your studies and hope to see you on Stellenbosch Campus.
Thank you.