Pham awarded grants to strengthen speech-language services for Vietnamese communities

Giang Pham, assistant professor in Communication Disorders, was recently awarded two grants to strengthen communication needs and services to Vietnamese communities regionally and abroad.

 

The campus’s International Studies Council and International Programs Office awarded Pham a $5,000 Internationalization Grant to conduct an exploratory trip to Vietnam during the 2013-14 academic year. Pham will investigate ways to incorporate an international perspective on speech and language disorders into the curriculum and to establish connections with universities in Vietnam for potential student and clinical exchanges.

 

“This is an important first step to establishing mutually beneficial partnerships with Vietnam that could enrich teaching, learning, and research experiences for students in Communication Disorders and the School of Public Health and Health Sciences,” said Pham.

 

Pham also received, in conjunction with the Springfield Vietnamese American Civic Association (SVACA), a $10,000 collaborative projects grant from the Western Massachusetts Public Health Training Center. She will work with the SVACA to identify gaps in the communication needs and available services for children who speak Vietnamese as a home language.

 

“The combination of these two opportunities enables me to ‘work locally, think globally,’ said  Pham. “I am very excited to work with the Vietnamese-American community here in western Massachusetts. This project is the first step to building a long lasting relationship between the community and university that will hopefully lead to intervention studies to promote first and second language development, an issue that affects many refugee and immigrant populations whether the home language is Vietnamese, Spanish, Urdu or Somali.”

 

This project will be the first collaboration between UMass Amherst and the Vietnamese-American community in western Massachusetts.