 |
||||||
|
||||||
|
 |
 |
|
Teaching Social Communication Skills to People Who Use AAC
 From the October 2001 Disabilities newsletter."A lot of focus goes into teaching communication skills [to people who use AAC], but opportunities for interaction are not always there," notes Janice Light, a professor in the department of communication disorders at Pennsylvania State University. To create ample opportunities, SLPs need to work with the people in an AAC user's environment, such as parents, teachers, and peers. Indeed, using the environment is essential to effective instruction, says Dr. Light. Instructors need to understand what the AAC user's priorities are and what skills they need to learn. Then, Dr. Light explains, instructors need to demonstrate and model communication with the individual, using supports, such as prompts, along the way. "Make sure skills can be generalized for real-world use," recommends Dr. Light. "We need to provide initial supports and teach, but we also need to work within the user's environment, with the people in that environment." But creating opportunities is the first hurdle. AAC users may also face conversation partners who talk too much or have low expectations for what the AAC user is able to say. They also must learn to talk about others as much as they can talk about themselves. "We need to build social skills for individuals using AAC systems," says Dr. Light. "Sometimes, individuals learn to talk about themselves in speech-language therapy. We need to teach them to show interest in others." To that end, Dr. Light recommends that SLPs use "partner-focused questions," (such as "How are you?") when teaching AAC users. Finally, another barrier to interaction for people using AAC, particularly for children, is perception among typically developing people. Dr. Light notes that "people may not be blatantly cruel, but they don't develop relationships" with AAC users. She recommends teachers use collaborative projects in their classrooms to encourage interaction between children using AAC and their classmates. Of course, Dr. Light admits that negative perceptions of AAC users extend throughout the population, but she notes that if perceptions and expectations of people using AAC systems are improved in childhood, the odds of positive relationships with AAC users in adulthood increase.
|
|
