What is your workplace and job title?

I work as a municipal reading consultant specialized in reading disabilities at Kompetencecenter for Læsning in Aarhus.
 

What are two or three examples of daily tasks?

1. Participation in meetings regarding children with complex reading and writing difficulties with teachers and parents to help both diagnose and analyze their individual educational needs.
2. Consulting with school leaders and counselors on their evaluation and intervention plans regarding children with learning and literacy difficulties.
3. Communication to all schools in Aarhus on new procedures, national laws, obligatory reading tests, materials, rights for children with special needs etc.
    

What are the two or three main things you got from linguistics?

The basic knowledge of the structural and social side of language paired with my specific knowledge of atypical language acquisition and neurological and cognitive linguistics are important foundations in my work with children in learning difficulties. This is for instance useful when determining whether a child’s reading and spelling errors point to a delay in learning Danish orthography or are indications of a phonological processing deficit. Also, my more general academic skills such as project managing and extracting essential information from law texts, research, and other complex texts are highly useful.

Most of my elective courses, individual projects and reports during my studies were focused on children in language and/or cognitive difficulties. My goal was to work with speech therapy after my master’s degree, but working with dyslexia and other literacy difficulties turned out to be my path instead - one that I haven’t regretted.