Fern Westernoff

Fern Westernoff is a speech-language pathologist with over thirty-five years of experience working in the Toronto District School Board, where she has focused on culturally and linguistically diverse students and communication disorders in education. She served on the Immigrant Assessment Team, an experience that led her to pursue doctoral studies in bilingualism and second language learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. She has also co-instructed in the Kindergarten Early Language Intervention (KELI) Program and served as a co-program leader supporting its development.

Westernoff is the author of _Powerful Practices for Supporting English Learners: Elevating Diverse Assets and Identities_, and she has published and presented widely in Canada, the United States, and Israel on topics related to cultural and linguistic diversity, bilingualism, and communication disorders. Her work includes coauthoring a position paper for the Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology on speech-language pathology and audiology in multicultural, multilingual contexts, and she has been identified as holding a PhD and practicing as a registered speech-language pathologist (Reg. CASLPO) in Ontario.