Literacy is a fundamental skill that is necessary for children to develop in order to learn, participate and integrate fully in society.  However, the development and promotion of literacy in children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCNs) is particularly challenging (Dockrell, et al., 2017(. Regardless of the variety of needs that this population may have, the opportunities to learn and develop intersect also with issues of equity and literacy (Lafontaine, et al., 2015) allowing better inclusion (Frey & Fishcer, 2018).  However, to implement a policy or apply new conceptualizations of literacy in practice, it is necessary to investigate the position, training/knowledge and attitudes of educators and health professionals as relevant agents of change.  In Israel, the official voices as the Ministry of Education or the National Israeli Association for Speech, Language and Hearing – have suggested that tailored literacy programs should be built and implemented in every class to enable access to literacy for all SLCNs.  Nevertheless, in terms of educators’ and health practitioners’ in the field, who implement policies, this issue is not self-evident.  Hence, the goals of the present study were a) to investigate the professionals’ abilities in terms of training and knowledge of both - special educators (SEs) and speech and language therapists (SLTs) – in their work in the field of literacy and b) to study the professionals’ attitudes regarding access to literacy for SLCNs. The current presentation seeks to compare quantitative findings with qualitative findings, in order to focus on areas of convergence and divergence on the aforementioned study goals. While some of the quantitative findings have been published (Zadunaisky-Ehrlich & Yifat, 2022), the focus here will allow us to get a more comprehensive picture and look for internal coherence. 

The current study adopted mixed methods with a convergent parallel design that combines quantitative with a qualitative tools and analysis (Creswell, 2008) The participants were 67 Special Educators (SEs) and 72 Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs). All of them worked in special education settings with more than 5 years of experience. Both cohorts completed a Likert-based survey (quantitatively delivered and analyzed) and a semi-structured interview (qualitatively analyzed) as it follows: a) The Likert-based scale survey was developed to examine the self-reported knowledge of the participating SEs and SLTs in the domains of literacy development, assessment and intervention and emergent literacy. The last part consisted of statements to elicit participants’ rating their degree of consent with items pertaining their approach to literacy and their roles in the promotion of literacy. b) Personal semi-structured interview were conducted to get a deeper understanding of the positions of the participants on the issues addressed Paired sample t-tests were conducted to compare SEs and SLTs in the different dimensions of literacy and chi square tests to compare the distribution of responses in both groups. Content analysis was applied to the personal interviews to identify common themes and in order to compare between the quantitative and qualitative analysis

Main findings indicated that the qualitative analysis brought up points that the quantitative analysis blurred indicating some divergences. To illustrate, the quantitative analysis showed that both groups agreed that access to literacy should be enabled for all children, however, in the interviews, most of the participants found it difficult to explain or even exemplify how it is put into practice or to indicate shifts in literacy practices to allow access to literacy. Some perceived aspects of literacy as irrelevant to the population they worked with and discussed meaningful gaps between policy and practice. Contrasting the quantitative findings, the qualitative analysis indicated in both groups an attitude of "deficit thinking" that views the population as deficient and within a self-fulfilling cycle of low expectations by teachers and low performance by students (Davis & Museus, 2019). Similarly, other inconsistencies were also found between the quantitative and qualitative findings regarding participants' self-reported knowledge and skills to promote literacy with the SLCN population. Among other things, during the interviews, the participants had difficulty describing or demonstrating the actual use of literacy practices (both in assessment and promotion), in contrast to the self-reported knowledge that was stated in the quantitative survey. Although in the last decades different conceptualizations of literacy have been promoted to sustain a position of inclusion allowing and promoting access to literacy to different and varied populations (e.g. “New Literacies” in Knobel & Lankshear, 2014; or “Multiliteracies” in Kalantzis et al., 2010); our findings indicate that these reconceptualizations, as well as understanding the attitudes and meaning of access to literacy for populations with a wide variety of needs, still remain as constant topics for discussion, elaboration and translation of conceptualizations into practice.

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