Christine Fiestas, PhD, CCC-SLP

Dr. Christine E. Fiestas is a core faculty member in the Master of Science Speech-Language Pathology program at the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences Austin, TX campus. She joined the program in the spring of 2020 as an Associate Professor and was promoted to her current position in December 2023.

She received both her Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Science from the University of Texas at Austin in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Her clinical specialty areas are in the assessment and treatment of developmental language disorders from birth through school ages as well as the assessment of reading and fluency disorders.

Her research includes the assessment and treatment of language and literacy disorders for individuals who are bilingual, multilingual and speakers of dialects that are not mainstream English. Dr. Fiestas was awarded an American Speech–Language–Hearing Association multicultural project grant award developing language assessment norms for Hawai’i Creole English. With colleagues she developed the Narrative Assessment Protocol-Spanish, which is a language development progress monitoring measure for preschool-aged Spanish speakers.

Dr. Fiestas has published research in the areas of dynamic assessment to discriminate children with language impairment from children who are learning English as a second language and on assessment techniques that consider typical disfluencies from stuttering-like dysfluencies for bilinguals. Additional research includes bilingual early literacy screening measures and language intervention techniques that will support the transfer of learning across languages for bilingual learners.