On February 03, 2024, we had a unique opportunity to welcome an eight-hour webinar from experienced speakers Professor Vilma Makauskiene (Lithuania) (pictured left) and Dr. Maria Faściszewska (Poland) (pictured right) on the topic “Stuttering in preschool and primary school children”.
Vilma Makauskine is a speech and language therapist, professor at Vilnius University of Lithuania, who has been studying stuttering professionally for over 15 years. Prof. Makauskine has studied in Canada, the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, and other countries. She is European certified in stuttering therapy.
Maria Faszciszewska: Speech and language therapist, PhD and lecturer at the University of Gdańsk in Poland. Dr. Dr. Faszciszewska has been studying stuttering for over 10 years and has her own website with digital tools, which are also translated into Ukrainian.
The webinar began with an analysis of different approaches to stuttering in modern research. It is important that this theoretical knowledge was fundamental to clinical practice, which the authors discussed during the webinar in considering clinical approaches to working with children, adolescents and adults with fluency disorders.
We had the opportunity to learn about different strategies that scientists in America, Germany, Holland, Britain, and Australia are working on. For our specialists, the methods of work aimed at cooperation with parents of children with stuttering and their everyday environment were quite new. And that such cooperation can be highly effective in just a few sessions without the direct work of a speech and language therapist with a child.
The speakers also shared methods for examining children with fluency disorders and questioning parents, as well as advice for teachers and educators working with such children.
The techniques for overcoming or reducing stuttering, such as: Easy breathing, Gentle starts and others.
In addition to evidence-based techniques, we also touched upon nonevidence-based techniques and ineffective techniques common in the Soviet Union: silence, speech therapy massages, etc.
Since the webinar was conducted in English, it only increased the motivation of our members to learn this English to communicate with our foreign colleagues without any problems. And now, thanks to consecutive interpretation by Oksana Lyalka, our Chairman of the Board, we were able to listen to the webinar with translation.
It is especially valuable that now we can learn more about stuttering from the book "Fluency Disorders" by Vilma Makauskine, which is available in Russian.
The entire Society for Speech and Language Therapy expresses its sincere gratitude for the high-quality interesting webinar that our European colleagues held for us free of charge and we look forward to continuing our cooperation. Soon we will have a speech and language therapy project for children of fallen soldiers, so this knowledge will be valuable.
