Discover how children learn to speak more than 45 home languages by watching 70+ presentations by international experts on our YouTube channel. The experts explain where the language is spoken, the components of the language (vowels, consonants, tones), and the assessments and interventions available to support children learning to speak that language.

Listen to the presentations in English, and many presentations are in a second language (e.g., Afrikaans, Azerbijani, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Jamaican, Japanese, Kurdish, Laki, Putonghua, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Tok Pisin, Turkish).

The Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Languages (SACHL, Margetson & McLeod, 2025) is a collaborative assessment approach where speech-language pathologists draw on the expertise of multilingual families and interpreters in their knowledge of their home language to consider children’s ability to speak intelligibly.

Typically, children acquire most vowels and tones in the first few years of life. By 5 years of age children have mastered most consonants and consonant clusters (McLeod & Crowe, 2018) and are intelligible to most conversational partners (McLeod, 2020). Speech acquisition can differ between languages and whether children are monolingual or multilingual.

The Intelligibility in Context Scale is a quick parent report measure of children's intelligibility with different conversational partners. The 7-item questionnaire rates the degree to which children's speech is understood by those they communicate with on a 5-point scale. It is available in over 70+ languages and has been found to be valid and reliable in many languages including Cantonese, Croatian, English, German, Italian, Jamaican, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, Slovenian, Swedish and Vietnamese.

How do you feel about the way you talk? How do you feel when you talk with different people? Questions for children, their siblings, friends, parents, teachers and others help researchers, teachers and speech-language pathologists, professionals and researchers to understand the lives of children, especially those who have difficulty speaking. The SPAA-C is available in a range of languages including Afrikaans, English, German, Polish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Free evidence-based resources have been developed to support Vietnamese-Australian children and families to maintain their home language and enhance speech skills in Vietnamese and English. The resources include many every-day strategies and can be applied to other languages. The VietSpeech research was funded by the Australian Research Council to support children to maintain Vietnamese as their home language.