Staff Directory

Ros Herman

Senior lecturer - deafness and hearing impairment

Biography

Ros Herman qualified as a Speech and Language Therapist (SLT) at Reading University, achieved her Masters at the University of London and completed her PhD at City University London. She has worked clinically with Deaf clients of all ages and works part-time at City University, lecturing on the BSc and PGDip courses for trainee SLTs and the MSc Human Communication course. Ros has a longstanding interest in the clinical skills of SLTs who work with Deaf people, and for many years ran the Advanced Clinical Studies Diploma at City University for qualified SLTs wishing to specialise in work with deaf people.

Ros' research interests are focused on language development in British Sign Language (BSL) and communication and reading in deaf people. Ros has worked actively to highlight the lack of assessment materials for Deaf children who are BSL users. She was project leader in the development of two major language assessments in BSL (Herman et al 1999, Herman et al 2004), representing the only available norm-referenced tests of any sign language in the world, and she played an active role in developing the DfES National Monitoring Protocol for Deaf Infants & Children (2004). She is an affiliate of DCAL (the Deafness, Cognition & Language Research Centre) and has worked on a project in with staff there to develop BSL norms for the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory and a more recent project to characterise language impairment in BSL. Ros is currently working on a major funded project to investigate reading and dyslexia in deaf children.

Ros has developed a Sign Language Assessment outreach service based at the Department of Language & Communication Science's on-site clinic, the Compass Centre, which offers clinical assessments of Deaf children and adults' communication in BSL. Ros also lectures and offers workshops to Teachers of the Deaf, Communication Support Workers and SLT Special Interest Groups on language acquisition in BSL and assessment of BSL and regularly runs training courses in use of the BSL Production Test for professionals working with Deaf children.

Selected Publications