Arrive in Porto, get settled into the hotel, and get ready for a great week! We’ll gather in the evening for our Welcome Dinner, where you’ll meet the SLPs you’ll be learning, exploring, and sharing meals with throughout the week.

We’ll also hear from a local guest speaker as we begin getting to know Portugal through its language, culture, and history. It’s a relaxed way to kick off our sixth annual International Conference on Multilingual Practice in Speech-Language Pathology and the beginning of a pretty incredible week.

We’ll start the morning with two Bilinguistics sessions focused on making our professional lives and our evaluations better.

First, we’ll explore how to reclaim motivation and satisfaction in today’s special education systems, with practical strategies for managing cognitive load, organizing our work, and focusing our time on what matters most. Then we’ll dive into non-standardized assessment, with hands-on approaches to language sampling, dynamic assessment, and translating those findings into meaningful clinical decisions and reports.

A hosted lunch for registered travelers. Local speakers and participating professionals

will join attendees at mixed tables, creating space for introductions before

the afternoon program.

After our morning sessions, the international part of our conference really comes to life. We’ll have lunch with local speech and language therapists and spend the afternoon learning about speech-language services in Portugal. Local professionals will share perspectives from different practice settings, followed by discussion, small-group case exchanges, and opportunities to compare how we approach our work across countries, languages, and cultures.

Our morning focuses on something every good evaluation needs: better information. We’ll look at modern ways to gather and integrate assessment data from parents, teachers, and health professionals; document a student’s language input and output; and organize all of that information into a cohesive clinical picture.

Then we’ll tackle one of the realities of multilingual assessment: What do you do when you don’t speak the child’s language? We’ll walk through practical strategies for successfully partnering with interpreters before, during, and after an evaluation.

After our morning of learning, we’re off to Guimarães, one of Portugal’s most historic cities. We’ll travel by train from Porto and meet local guides to explore the Palace of the Dukes of Braganza, Guimarães Castle, Largo da Oliveira, and Praça de São Tiago. There will also be time to wander, grab a coffee, take pictures, and enjoy the historic center before we head back to Porto in the evening.

Depart by train from Porto to Guimarães. Planning allowance: approximately 75-90 minutes on the train, plus boarding and station transfers. These are target windows, not published July 2027 departures.

Meet local guides and transfer to the palace and castle area. A prearranged station-to-monument shuttle is planned to preserve visiting time; final transport details will be confirmed.

Regroup and return to the station for the booked train service. Plan to return to the hotel at approximately 8:00-9:00 p.m., subject to the final timetable. Dinner is on your own; allow time for a snack before departure.

Today we’ll dig into one of the biggest challenges in multilingual practice: determining whether a student’s patterns reflect a communication disorder or the expected influence of learning and using multiple languages.

We’ll spend the morning putting contrastive analysis into practice—first with speech and then with language. You’ll work through examples, compare linguistic features, analyze student productions, and practice using what you learn to make better clinical decisions. We’ll also look beyond speech-language pathology to explore how classroom teachers, ESL teachers, and literacy specialists can use contrastive analyses to better understand the performance of multilingual students.

Explore Porto at your own pace. You might visit São Bento Station and Sé Cathedral, wander down Rua das Flores, climb Clérigos Tower, visit the famous Livraria Lello, walk across the Dom Luís I Bridge, or simply find a café along the Ribeira waterfront and watch the world go by. There are no scheduled group activities, so you can make the afternoon as active—or as leisurely—as you’d like.

We’ll finish our professional learning with two topics that have enormous potential to improve both the quality and efficiency of our work.

First, we’ll take language sampling from something that can feel complicated and time-consuming to a process you can actually use: collect, transcribe, analyze, interpret, and write. We’ll explore practical elicitation strategies and show how language samples can contribute to decisions about difference versus disorder, goal development, and dismissal.

Then we’ll re-envision the re-evaluation process. Rather than automatically starting over with another battery of tests, we’ll explore how therapy data, progress notes, language samples, parent and teacher input, and what you already know about the student can contribute to more efficient and meaningful re-evaluations—and better decisions about continued services and dismissal.

We’ll gather in the early evening for a private cruise on the Douro River, taking in Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia from the water. After our cruise, we’ll head into Porto’s historic center for a special Farewell Dinner together. It’s our chance to celebrate everything we’ve learned, the places we’ve explored, and—most importantly—the new friendships we’ve made along the way.

Allow a full hour to leave the boat, walk or transfer to the dinner venue, and be seated.

Gather in Porto's old city for a hosted dinner and a celebration of the week.

After five nights of learning, exploring, eating, laughing, and connecting, it’s time to say goodbye to Porto—and to the people who made the week so memorable.

Check out of the hotel and begin your journey home or stay a coupe of extra nights and take a wine tour with us up the Douro River Valley, hopefully taking with you much more than CE hours: practical tools you can use immediately, a new perspective on multilingual practice, memories of Portugal, and a whole new community of colleagues and friends.

There is something special about learning alongside colleagues and then stepping outside the conference room to experience another language and culture together. Throughout the week, we’ll move between hands-on professional learning, conversations with Portuguese colleagues, historic sites, independent exploration, shared meals, and time together on the Douro.

That’s what we love about these international conferences. You don’t just come home with new information. You come home having experienced it.