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Profile of a Pioneer: Part I

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Martha Lynch and Ronald Goldman at the first 1996 Martha E. Lynch Lecture

Teacher. Speech-language pathologist. Lecturer. Researcher. Author. These titles are just some of the many roles Martha E. Lynch has embraced throughout her extraordinary career. She has dedicated approximately forty years of her life to the profession of speech-language pathology, and her story is one of steadfast service, innovation, and inspiration.

As an undergraduate college student, Martha majored in elementary education at Middle Tennessee State University. While student teaching, she encountered students with articulation disorders, one student who stuttered, and another with an unrepaired cleft palate. Because of these experiences, Martha became very interested in speech-language pathology. She minored in public speaking and took every speech class available at the college.

After graduating, Martha still set her goal on becoming a classroom teacher, but wanted to get her masters. She was offered a graduate scholarship at Vanderbilt University and began to pursue a masters degree in speech-language pathology. "I thought speech-language pathology would be a great background for a classroom teacher. At that point, schools were not required to have speech-language pathologists in classrooms. It was not a state or federal law," Martha explains.

After a few months Martha decided to stay in the area of speech-language pathology and use her teaching background as supplementary. Before she graduated, she accepted a position at Bill Wilkerson Hearing & Speech Center in Nashville, Tennessee. "One of my first responsibilities was to set up a program for severely language-impaired kids. I organized and taught most of these classes myself. I always viewed myself as a teacher, but with the special skills of a speech-language pathologist," says Martha.

She continued to work at Wilkerson Center after receiving her M.S. degree from Vanderbilt University. During her 14-year tenure at the center, she served as a speech clinician, supervisor of the children's language program, research assistant, coordinator of speech pathology, clinical coordinator, chief speech pathologist, and instructor at Vanderbilt and Peabody College.

One of the projects Martha worked on included developing a new program for children with severe speech problems. She worked with Dr. Ronald Goldman, a researcher at Wilkerson.

Martha elaborates: "At the time I was working with kids who did not benefit from the traditional auditory approach. Back then other approaches weren't available. So I experimented and tied in some things used in schools from my elementary education background. I began showing the visual symbols to these kids while I was working on their speech, rather than just using an auditory approach. When we were working on a sound, I would teach them the letter and the sound that the letter made and found that it did help."

Martha and Ronald then started to develop a program to meet the needs of these children. Ronald received a research grant, and they started using the newly developed phonemic visual oral association approach to see if it would indeed improve children's articulation abilities. They used the Initial Teaching Alphabet developed by Sir Isaac Pitman as their symbol system.

"We got excellent results from the project. We found that the kids did make faster progress. The severe dyspraxic kids and the severe artic kids corrected more errors over a given period of time with the phonemic visual oral association approach, as opposed to the traditional auditory approach. We did additional studies and developed our own modified alphabet that also had a one-on-one sound correspondence, so that there wouldn't be any confusion and could be used with very young children." Ronald and Martha expanded the research project to develop the Goldman-Lynch Sounds & Symbols Development Kit. They field-tested the program for about eight years before it was published in 1971.

The Goldman-Lynch Sounds & Symbols Development Kit was revised in 1986 and renamed the High Hat Early Reading Program. This year the program was updated again and is now titled, Sounds & Symbols Early Reading Program.

According to Ronald, in the past children with language difficulties were not diagnosed or treated until they reached the first and second grades. Today screening occurs at the prekindergarten through kindergarten level. He credits Martha with helping make that happen by being a strong advocate for early intervention. "Martha has been involved with literacy—reading and phonics—since the '60s and '70s. She is one of the pioneers of early intervention," he says.

For the last 24 years, Martha has worked in private practice as a speech-language pathologist in Nashville, Tennessee. She likes the direct patient contact and has a great deal of experience working with children who have dyslexia, dysgraphia, and other communication disorders. Ronald describes her as "outstanding," "highly respected," and "a clinician's clinician." He adds, "If I had a child who needed intervention, Martha would be the one I would choose to work with my child."

See Part II of Article >>