Parental Partnership in a Plurilingual and Pluricultural Context
Building a parental partnership rooted in the linguistic and cultural reality of families
Strengthen your therapeutic alliance in a multilingual context with greater clarity, consistency, and professional confidence, aligned with families' linguistic and cultural realities.
A Clinically Complex Reality
You work with children from multilingual and multicultural backgrounds, but you sometimes encounter:
❌ cultural misunderstandings;
❌ differences in values or expectations regarding development and communication;
❌ difficulties in engaging non-native speaking parents in follow-up care;
❌ tools or methods that do not adapt to families' linguistic and cultural realities and competencies;
❌ a feeling of working "instead of" the family rather than with them.
You want to intervene with respect, effectiveness, and cultural sensitivity... but you feel you lack concrete tools to truly understand the child's family and linguistic context.
Why is this training necessary now?
Overview
Speech therapists themselves are often not 100% convinced of the effectiveness of parental intervention. Imagine the parents!
When we tell parents that they will be doing most of the work, that our job is to support and guide them through this process, the reception isn't always as enthusiastic as we'd like!
Learning objectives
At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
- Understand the challenges (experience, expectations, intra-family dynamics) associated with supporting multilingual and multicultural families;
- Identify implicit biases that can influence the relationship with parents and adjust their professional stance;
- Use and adapt relevant clinical tools, including ethnolinguistic interviews, to better understand the family and linguistic context;
- Implement strategies to gradually transition towards a respectful parental partnership adapted to cultural realities;
- Adjust their clinical interventions by flexibly modulating their professional stance according to each family's linguistic and cultural context.
Ultimately, to know how to adjust your practice without compromising your clinical rigor.
work as a team with the parent and increase moments of stimulation.
guide the parent to make changes that will have a significant impact on the child's life and their surroundings.
journey with a more reluctant parent and move away from the expert therapist model by creating an alliance with them.
Yes, it's possible, by integrating parental partnership into your practice!
Expected outcomes
Upon completion of this training, participants will be better equipped to:
- Communicate more accurately, sensitively, and in line with the realities of multilingual and multicultural families
- Strengthen the therapeutic alliance in a context of linguistic and cultural diversity;
- Reduce misunderstandings related to cultural differences;
- Support parental involvement in speech therapy and during the transfer to daily life.
Who are we?
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Melissa Farkouh, Speech Therapist
Melissa Farkouh, a speech therapist specializing in multilingualism in children, dynamic assessment, and parent-child partnerships, founded a private clinic in Montreal in 2012. She supported children and their parents in healthcare facilities, daycares, and through telepractice.
Today, she trains education and speech therapy professionals to optimize their interventions while advocating for parent-child partnerships. She also co-authored an article in March 2024 in issue 297 of the scientific journal Rééducation orthophonique, published by Ortho Éditions. Melissa has trained speech therapists from Canada, as well as Switzerland, France, Lebanon, and Algeria.
A mother of two bilingual children, she speaks French, English, and Arabic, and values cultural diversity and inclusion in her life and practice.
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Jérémy Périchon, Speech Therapist
Jérémy Périchon is a speech therapist, trainer, and PhD student in language sciences at the University of Clermont Auvergne. Since 2018, he has been in private practice, working with children, adolescents, and their families in various clinical contexts.
His background has led him to develop recognized expertise in parent partnership in speech therapy. Since 2021, he has been teaching at the speech therapy department in Clermont-Ferrand, where he is responsible for teaching units in written language and supervises numerous student dissertations.
His current research focuses on the functional impact of language and learning disorders, with particular attention to their concrete repercussions on the daily lives of children and their families. He is the author of scientific publications and clinical tools distributed in France and internationally.
Convinced that the quality of care relies on authentic collaboration with families, he actively contributes to evolving practices towards a more integrative and partnership-based model.
