Building AAC Competencies
How often is the child learning language with their AAC device?
If a child learns to use their communication
aid for 30 minutes twice a week with their speech and language therapist, then it would take 84 years for them to be exposed to as much language as a typical 18-month old. This statistic is intended to make the point that it is everyone’s responsibility
to become good communication partners and to ensure that the communication aid is available in as many situations as possible for the child.
The Four Competencies
Janice Light has written about the four areas that a child needs to develop in order to become a competent AAC communicator. This is very useful when working with a child because you can consider how they might be learning in all these areas.
Janice Light and David McNaughton revisited the ideas in 2014 (downlod PDF slides). You will recognise each competency
as they have been mentioned and linked to the Tobii dynavox Pathways for Core First.
Each tab represents one of the four original competencies.
Linguistic competencies involve the following:
- The meanings of symbols – The obvious one, such what does a symbol showing a stickman holding his hands in the air mean?
- Syntactic skills – How to combine symbols to create meaningful sentences
Operational competencies involve the following:
- The access method - Children with physical disabilities may have to learn to use switches or other methods to make selections on the device including paper-based resources
- Navigation between pages - Learning how all the language is laid out and categorised and how to turn the pages (for both electronic and paper-based communication aids)
- Volume - How to turn the volume up and down is an important skill that children who speak are taught!
- Clearing the message bar - This ensures that multiple messages don’t run together – making for long utterances that are difficult to understand
Strategic competencies relate, largely, to how to deal with the limitations of the communication aid, e.g.
- Volume - How to get your message across in a noisy classroom?
- Vocabulary - Symbols users will always have a limited vocabulary on their communication aids. An example heard recently is there is no word for ‘cruise’ on a communication aid so the child combined two words ‘hotel’ and ‘boats’
- Environmental - What should the child do when they go outside when and their eyegaze does not work?
Social competencies include a list of how the child uses the device in practical terms to:
- Take conversational turns
- Start conversations
- Maintain topics of interest
- Ask for information,
- Tell people things
- Agree and confirm
Additional Information as a result of the updates to the four competencies include Changes to AAC Systems and Expectations for Participation, Demographics and the Scope of Communication Need
Whenever any classroom activity is being considered for an AAC user then an awareness of these four essential areas of AAC skill development is necessary. Such activities may fit to existing AAC teaching styles such as explicit instruction, incidental
teaching, mand-model or conversational coaching.
However, most linguistic, operational, strategic and social skills are developed through modelling, whereby the communication partner uses the AAC user’s device to talk to them. This is known to have a profound effect on the development of children who
use AAC.
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The importance of modelling has been mentioned at every level
during this course. Point-Talking is a descriptive 