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Do speech therapists and speech pathologists have to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet as part of their profession? They might want to learn it, but my question really is: are they required to learn it?

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    Are you asking about legal requirements, or practical requirements (e.g. an engineer effectively "has to" know calculus)?
    – user6726
    Jun 24 '17 at 14:45
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    In my country (Brazil) speech pathologists took basic phonetics classes with us linguists, as a required first-year subject in their undergraduate course. So I expect speech pathologists are required to learn it in order to graduate. They probably also study their own extensions to the IPA after doing basic phonetics.
    – melissa_boiko
    Jun 24 '17 at 17:01
  • Speech pathology is treated as applied linguistics in every country where I'm familiar with the training of speech pathologists. Particularly with phonetics; they have to know phonetics really well, because they deal with it clinically every day.
    – jlawler
    Jun 25 '17 at 1:13
  • We cannot answer the question unless you specify the answers to 1) Required by whom? 2) Required for what purpose? And possibly (depending on the answers to 1 and 2): 3) In what jursidiction?
    – Colin Fine
    Jun 25 '17 at 20:03
  • There is one further point that needs to be clarified: learn how well? Generally, phoneticians have to learn the IPA totally save for the disordered extensions; linguists have to learn errrm 50% of it; I believe that SPHS students only have to learn the English subset (and maybe the disordered extension, depending on institution). That would differ in France, Germany, Greece, etc.
    – user6726
    Jun 26 '17 at 1:12
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Before I retired (7 years ago) I taught a linguistics course in articulatory phonetics from time to time. About half my class were undergraduate majors in Speech Pathology. So that course was clearly a requirement for Speech Path at that time.

I used IPA in the course, but there was never a requirement to learn IPA. Linguistics is not about learning notations. You can just look at a chart for that.

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