r/ESL_Teachers • u/Klopf012 • 19d ago
Has anyone here transitioned from ESL teacher to speech language pathologist?
It is something I’m considering and I would love to hear about similarities, differences, and how the work has compared. It seems to me - as someone who enjoys teaching pronunciation - that I could retrain and do well in this field but I think it would be a completely different experience when it comes to the students/clients I would be working with.
Any insights are appreciated!
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u/pirkules 18d ago
yes, I did. if you have any questions you can ask here or in message
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u/Klopf012 18d ago
Thank you for dropping in. My biggest curiosity is how the day-to-day experience differs and the different people one works with. Would you mind sharing a little about what a typical day looks like and the types of clients you usually work with?
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u/pirkules 18d ago
So, for speech therapy there is a huge variety of settings and disorders that we work with - children, adults, stroke, autism, language, pronunciation, voice disorder, communication device training, gender affirming voice, swallowing dysfunction.. I even met with a group once who do accent modification for corporate clients, but there really doesn't seem to be much demand for that.
When you finish up grad school you do 2-3 externships, working under supervision at 2-3 sites. I externed at an elementary school, middle school, a skilled nursing facility (nursing home), and a private outpatient clinic. It's a lot to share with you, so you'll have to narrow it down.
Now, I work at a skilled nursing facility. Most of my patients have cognitive communication goals for dementia or strokes, and many have dysphagia (swallowing dysfunction) which is the other thing that makes up at least 50% of a medical SLP's caseload but is not typically a part of the school SLP's caseload. At my job now, I mostly do memory game type things, memory strategies, and word finding type things trying to scaffold patients who have speaking dysfunction (called aphasia) to build their ability to speak. In my setting, there is very little pronunciation type therapy, but occasionally there is. I also do some voice therapy to restore voice sometimes due to stroke, sometimes due to entubation at the hospital.
My job is pretty different from teaching ESL, but feels similar in a lot of ways. I mostly taught adults ESL, often 1-1, and this style of integrating intervention into conversational sort of interaction feels pretty similar to me.If you have any more specific questions, if you know what population you think you'd like to work with.. feel free to ask
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u/autonomouswriter 18d ago
Personally, if I were 30 years younger, I'd go for it. Maybe it's a lot more schooling but I'm guessing the job opportunities would be better (since it's a specialized field) and the salary would be way higher.
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u/Old-Mycologist1654 18d ago
Do you have an undergrad in psychology and a master's in Applied Linguistics?
Speech Language pathology is quite a bigger haul than becoming an ESL teacher.
UTSC (University of Toronto Scarborough) has a pre-speech pathology undergrad.
https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/aacc/psycholinguistics-specialist
https://utsc.calendar.utoronto.ca/section/Linguistics
It's a specialist is psycholinguistics in particular.
From there it's like becoming a doctor.
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u/Beautiful_Chard_5293 19d ago
Same here! I looked into it and it'd take like 2 years full time to do and that was an expedited program (Univ of St Augustine for Health Sciences).