About Us

Asian Pacific Islander Caucus

The Asia Pacific Caucus is a group comprised of speech and hearing professionals from Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Guam, Hawaii, and the U.S. mainland (with highest concentrations in California and New York. Some of the challenges facing the caucus are extreme shortages of bilingual personnel prepared to deal with diverse Asian/Pacific populations, lack of instruments for assessing communication disorders, scarcity and elusiveness of materials for intervention, and difficulty in recruiting and retaining Asian/Pacific students.

Some shared goals are

  1. to increase the number of Asian/Pacific Islander bilingual culturally-linguistically diverse (CLD) speech-language pathologists and audiologists who have the competence to provide quality services;
  2. to increase the cultural and linguistic appropriateness of education, medical, and health programs and support services for API LEP/FEB CLD children, youth, their families, and other individuals;
  3. to advance the awareness, sensitivity, and competence of API LEP/FEP CLD issues among speech and hearing professionals and other educational, clinical, and medical personnel; and
  4. to continue research efforts in providing data relating to clinical management of API/CLD CD populations.