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Rick Hohn, AAC Consultant
DynaVox Systems, Inc.
1125 Cottontail Road.
Vista, CA 92083
Phone: 760-598-8336
E-Mail rickstalk@juno.com
Developing good literacy skills has always been a challenge
for parents, teachers and speech-language pathologists when
teaching children and adults with severe communication disorders.
Rick Hohn, a proficient DynaVox user, has seen changes in special
education since the 1950’s and believes that AAC since it
was brought into existence should do far more to promote literacy
skills.
The data from Kirsch, I., Jungleblut, A., Jenkins, L., and
Kolstad, A. (1993) indicate that 44% to 47% of adults with
physical impairments and 53% to 55% of adults with significant
speech difficulties perform at the lowest levels of literacy
proficiency. Without access to literacy skills, an individual is
significantly limited in the educational, vocational, and social
opportunities found in almost all activities of daily living
(Light & Smith, 1993). Many educators will agree that the
ability to read, write, and spell is the most important life
skill a student will learn while in school. However, the
development of literacy skills among individuals with severe
disabilities has become a topic of much discussion. Research
suggests that individuals with severe disabilities often
demonstrate decreased literacy skills (Dahlgren Sandberg &
Hjelmquist, 1996; Light & Smith, 1993). These individuals may
demonstrate a variety of physical, fine motor, language,
cognitive or visual impairments that can be detrimental to their
ability to access literacy activities. Therefore, it is necessary
to consider these factors when designing implementation
strategies to provide alternate access to literacy activities
(Beukelman & Mirenda, 1998).
This presentation will focus on how AAC can be used to foster
literacy skills and will introduce strategies for using an
augmentative communication system to help someone learn to read
and write.
Participants will first hear of Rick’s struggle and how he
learned to read from his first typed words on a typewriter at 15
years of age. Seeing how words were spelled and formed on the
typewritten page picked up his reading skills dramatically. He
learned by doing.
The learning-by-doing principle is vital and is now aided by
augmentative devices – replacing the typewriter. An AAC
device shouldn’t be only for communication purposes but
also used as a tool towards establishing good literacy skills.
Rick will point out that communication, if it at all possible,
must be followed by education instead of leaving individuals at
the beginning stages of conversational interaction. The real
world is also based on reading and writing requirements.
Such a learning-by-doing program is The Literacy for Children
with Dysarthria project developed by Carol Civils, M.A. CCC-SLP,
Marie Williams, M. Ed., and Judith Oxley, Ph.D. CCC-SLP. With
this concept, character strings can be placed into buttons on a
keyboard page. When these buttons are pressed, an auditory cue of
the phoneme that represents the grapheme will be provided. As
sounds are put together to form a word, the entire word can be
spoken. Thus, a teacher sounds out a word followed by a student
accessing a DynaVox or a DynaMyte with a phonetic page to spell
the word. This program will be demonstrated and discussed.
The means for an individual to "sound out" words is important in
the learning by doing process. Dahlgren Sandberg and Hjelmquist
(1996) cite a study by Yopp (1988) in which the phonemic
awareness tasks presented in the study required a "subvocal
analysis" of the words and their sounds. This highly suggests
that speaking children are at an advantage because they have the
ability to "sound out" the representations, to solve the
awareness tasks.
Simple communication is made possible by dynamic display pages.
There is a danger, however, in leaving an augmentative
communicator at this beginning level of communication instead of
attempting to graduate him or her to a system that will allow the
generation of novel statements. Word prediction is one method
that allows this kind of freedom to spontaneously interact with
people. It opens a whole dictionary up not only for communication
purposes but also to advance literacy skills.
Word prediction greatly aids spelling especially if the first
character is known. AAC users have a choice of words to select
from. Although word prediction assists in spelling, a discussion
will take place about at what point, if at all, should children
learn how to spell whole words without this feature being used.
If so, what graduating process should be used to introduce word
prediction?
Rick will discuss the importance of challenging the augmented
communicator to read without the symbols at appropriate
opportunities, for example during structured reading instruction.
There is a delicate balance that has to be achieved by
educational professionals and parents as to when to wean children
from symbols. Sensitivity and discretion must be used. For there
is nothing worse than anyone wanting to communicate a need but is
prohibited out of a goal to teach literacy skills. And yet,
symbol dependency is an easy way out, leaving young augmentative
communicators unprepared for the real world later on in
life.
The presenter will tell how symbols could have been
an-easy-way-out for him if they were available when he went to
school. With this in mind, a discussion will follow of what
graduating process should be used to introduce the use of
symbols.
Once a user isn’t dependent on symbols, they can speed
communication up. Rick will discuss how to introduce symbols to
children – providing an easy recognition of words just as
landmarks provide drivers with an easy way to get to their
destination. An explanation and demonstration will be given to
customize symbols so they will be even more recognizable.
Rick still has a slight reading disability so he will discuss
strategies for both children and adults that can benefit from.
One such method is word processing cut-and-paste techniques that
he uses in having both his DynaVox 3100 and DynaVox for Windows
read to him. Because of his significant speech disorder, he needs
this alternative auditory feedback. In using this method, he is a
better writer since he can hear what he has written - a method
that can be shared by other augmentative communicators. Rick will
also share how these techniques has decreased the time spent on
reading text by having material read to him on either his
augmentative device or computer.
Rick will explain how by using word processing cut-and-paste
features a broad range of information from and the Internet can
be transferred to the device in seconds. If a scanner is
available, books and magazines can be read with also the ability
to speak specific paragraphs and control the speech rate. This
makes it possible for augmentative communicators to read to
others the things they wish to share – thus being on the
giving end.
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