Today, we return to Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire to view another video from their AAC Initiative. In this presentation, Michael McSheehan reviews the domains of communicative competence in AAC and discusses issues and research supports for each area.
Filed under: PrAACtical Thinking
Tagged With: communicative competence, Michael McSheehan, University of New Hampshire
The wonderful team at PaTTAN provides amazingly strong content for school-based professionals and families in support of students with AT needs. Lucky for those of us who live far from Pennsylvania that they videotape some of their trainings and provide them online for the broader world. In this set of videos, Drs. Jacqueline Kearns and Jane Kleinert from the University of Kentucky, share information about helping students with significant communication challenges become better communicators as they learn academic content.
Filed under: Video of the Week
Tagged With: communicative competence, education
We couldn’t be more excited to have a return visit from Marlene Cummings, a wonderful SLP who is currently serving as an AAC Consultant to the AAC Team at Oakland Schools. In her first post, Marlene talked about strategies for cultivating the right mindset for AAC teaching. In this post, Marlene continues sharing elements of her Framework for Success in discussing the Knowledge Toolbox, developed with the Oakland Schools AAC Team. 5 Things in Your “Knowledge Toolbox” What is already in my “knowledge toolbox” of communication, language and learning? Yes, you do have a full toolbox. You just don’t realize it. And of course there are always new and exciting things to add. You already know this stuff!! REMEMBER??? It is important to step back and think broadly about communication and what it really does. Sometimes we get caught in the details of our work and can’t see the forest through the... [Read More...]
Filed under: PrAACtical Thinking
Tagged With: AAC team, classroom, communication opportunities, communicative competence, communicative function, communicative intent, education, How I Do It, language development, Marlene Cummings, schools
Although it has been close to 25 years since Dr. Janice Light’s hallmark paper on communicative competence in AAC discussed four main purposes of communication, many AAC systems are still heavily populated with messages for basic wants and needs. The other areas – information transfer, social closeness, social etiquette – are often underrepresented in AAC systems. We scratched the surface of how to teach basic requesting last month, and now we’re ready to talk about communicating for other reasons. In this post, we’ll talk about some of the clinical issues in teaching communication for the purpose of information transfer. A big reason that we express ourselves is to share information that others want or need. It may not seem like a high priority until we realize how often we need to do this to function in our daily lives. Here are some examples, both positive and negative, from our work... [Read More...]
Filed under: Strategy of the Month
Tagged With: AAC goals, communicative competence, information transfer, language intervention, strategy
This post was inspired by a budding young professional who loves AAC and is DETERMINED to provide best practice services for the young students she serves. (See?? This is why we love being clinical educators!) We were chatting about a youngster on her caseload who uses an eyegaze SGD and is making some good progress with the technical aspects of it. Our conversation turned to goal setting. – First, a word about how to talk about AAC in the goals and objectives. For people who use SGDs, there are pros and cons to naming the actual device in the goal. Some SLPs favor that, while others prefer a more flexible approach and describe the device features. More about that another time. A more general concern about writing AAC goals is the tendency to focus more on operating equipment than on becoming an effective communicator. Clearly, we advocate the latter: AAC... [Read More...]
Filed under: PrAACtical Thinking
Tagged With: AAC system, communicative competence, goals, intervention, language, linguistic competence, objectives, operational competence, social skills, strategic competence