Candidate Teachers’ Attitude and Knowledge Toward Speech and Language Disorders in Children

Number of people with speech and language disorders is increasing every day (McLeod & McKinnon, 2007, p. 41). This can negatively impact the academic performance and decrease the psychosocial well-being of the people with speech and language disorders. Teachers play a significant role in diagnosing and treatment of these disorders. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate the knowledge and attitudes of candidate teachers towards speech and language disorders. The sample consisted of 40 candidate teachers from Kocaeli University and a self-administered survey by Togram and Mavis (2009, s.74) was completed. The main findings of the study reveal that the majority of the candidate teachers believe that speech and language therapies should be carried in therapy rooms instead of social settings like schools. More than half of the participants (77.5%) agreed that people with speech and language disorders can easily transfer the learned abilities in therapies without any additional support from the teachers (87.5%). All of the participants (100 %) have positive attitudes observing the therapy sessions and know the importance of being informed about the communicational needs of the students. The majority of participating candidate teachers also believed that the causes of speech and language disorders are psychological (60 %) and these are also risk factors for the future learning disorders. Most of the candidate teachers disagreed with the statement that children will not be able to learn reading because of the speech problems (75%)