Hannelie Bezuidenhout Yspeert

Hannelie has been based in Dubai since 2009 and brings over 25 years of experience supporting children, their families, and their learning environments. Before moving to Dubai, she worked for a decade in an inclusive school in South Africa as part of a multidisciplinary team, providing both group and individual therapy.

She is trained and certified in a wide range of evidence-based programs, including Hanen (It Takes Two to Talk, Learning Language and Loving It, More Than Words, TalkAbility, Target Word, Teacher Talk), PROMPT, AutPlay, Attention Autism, Lidcombe, Orton-Gillingham, RAVE-O, Spell-Links, THRASS, Interactive Metronome, and Natural Language Acquisition (NLA). She also has training in SCERTS, Social Thinking, Play Therapy, Intensive Interaction, CAPDOTS, the Listening Program, Makaton, AAC approaches such as the Pixon Project, and autism assessment tools including ADOS-2 and MIGDAS-2.

Drawing on this breadth of knowledge, Hannelie creates personalized intervention plans that are practical, empowering, and tailored to each child’s needs. She specializes in supporting speech sound production, fluency, auditory processing, language, literacy, social-pragmatic skills, and executive functioning. Her areas of expertise include childhood apraxia of speech, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, dyslexia, developmental language disorder (DLD), and stuttering.

Hannelie’s therapy is playful, strengths-based, and firmly neuroaffirmative. She integrates narrative-building and interactive approaches to nurture communication, connection, and concept formation. Therapy is available in both English and Afrikaans, and she works closely with families and schools to ensure consistent support across settings.

At the heart of her practice, Hannelie celebrates each child’s unique communication style, empowering them to grow in confidence, learning, relationships, and daily life.

“As a paediatric speech, language, and literacy therapist, I see myself as a catalyst for communication — using the power of storytelling to help children discover and shape their own voices. I believe every child’s journey is a story worth telling, and my role is to guide them from their very first words to confident self-expression. Through narrative-focused, family-centred intervention, therapy becomes more than skill-building: it becomes a meaningful process of growth and connection — where children learn not only to communicate, but to share their ideas with confidence and joy.”