Who we are 

Skill Builders Speech Language Therapy is a professional and friendly speech language therapy clinic in Auckland, New Zealand.  It provides specialist stuttering intervention for children, teenagers, and adults who stutter and individualised literacy instruction for students with reading and writing difficulties. Services to children with broader speech and language difficulties are also provided as Skill Builders aims to build effective communication skills in people all of ages to ensure that they fulfil their social, education, emotional and vocational potential. 

Areas of specialty

Skill Builders work with clients who have:

• Stuttering and related fluency disorders (for example cluttering or atypical disfluency)

• Speech sound disorders

• Difficulties in understanding and using spoken language

• Pre-literacy difficulties

• Reading and writing difficulties

• Specific learning difficulties (for example Dyslexia and Dysgraphia)

For pre-school stuttering therapy, Voon was the first speech-language therapist in New Zealand trained in 3 different evidence-based therapy approaches: 1) Palin Parent Child Interaction Therapy (Palin PCI), 2) RESTART Demands & Capacities Model treatment (RESTART-DCM), and the 3) Lidcombe Program. He is experienced in integrating “less direct” therapy with “more direct” therapy to optimise outcomes for pre-schoolers who stutter. For adult stuttering therapy, Voon is the only speech-language therapist in New Zealand trained in Avoidance Reduction Therapy for Stuttering (ARTS®) and integrates this with cognitive approaches to address the underlying fear and avoidance behaviours associated with stuttering. Therapy for school-aged children and teenagers who stutter is orientated towards empowering young people to have choices in how they want to speak, increasing one’s confidence and comfort in identifying as an individual who stutters, and creating support networks to reduce the burden of “masking” or “concealment”.

For reading and writing difficulties, Voon is trained in Sounds-Write (structured synthetic phonics), Talk For Writing, Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Intervention, and the Clever Kids program by trainers from the Dyslexia-SPELD Foundation of Western Australia. He has also attended other professional development events by Jenny Baker, Lyn Stone, the late William Van Cleave, and the clinical and research team at Macquarie University Reading Clinic. Voon was the first speech-language therapist in New Zealand to be trained in the Clever Kids program in 2022. Voon, alongside his speech-language therapist colleague Liz Gibson, coordinates a Clever Kids Camp for 8-13 year old students with dyslexia. He is particularly interested in building dyslexic students up through literacy instruction as well as incorporating cognitive approaches to reduce and undo feelings of shame after prolonged periods of reading and spelling “failure” at school.

About Voon Pang

Voon has worked as a speech language therapist since 2007. He enjoys working with people who stutter and people with speech and literacy related difficulties. When he is not at Skill Builders Speech Language Therapy, he dedicates his time volunteering for the Stuttering Association for the Young Australia (SAY: Australia) during their summer camp, baking sweet treats at home, and walking his greyhound. Voon also works for the Ministry of Education as a speech-language therapist servicing different parts of Auckland. His previous posts include working at the Stuttering Treatment and Research Trust (2011-2019) and introducing comprehensive therapy approaches to be less “fluency-focused” and as a Clinical Educator at the University of Auckland (2019-2022) supervising 1st year Masters students. His passion is to help people become the best communicator they can be as well as standing tall and being proud of their individuality.

Voon continues to attend professional development workshops and conferences annually to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the stuttering and literacy world. He is a registered member of the New Zealand’s Speech-language Therapists’ Association (NZSTA), Speech Pathology Australia (SPA), International Fluency Association (IFA) and Dyslexia-SPELD Foundation (DSF) of Western Australia.