AAC Strategies for Individuals with Moderate to Severe Disabilities

With more children and young adults with severe disabilities in today's general education classrooms, SLPs and other professionals must be ready to support their students' communication skills with effective AAC. They'll get the proven strategies they need with this intervention guide from top AAC experts, ideal for use as an in-service professional development resource or a highly practical text students will keep and use long after class is over.

Essential for SLPs, OTs, PTs, educators, and other professionals in school settings, this book helps readers establish a beginning functional communicative repertoire for learners with severe disabilities. Professionals will start with an in-depth intervention framework, including a guide to AAC modes and technologies, variables to consider when selecting AAC, and how AAC research can be used to support practice. Then they'll get explicit, evidence-based instructional strategies they'll use to help children and young adults:

• initiate, maintain, and terminate an interaction
• repair communication breakdowns
• match graphic symbols to objects and events
• request access to desired objects and activities
• escape and avoid unwanted objects and activities
• use alternative selection methods if they have severe motor impairments
• strengthen language comprehension and adaptive functioning
• enhance intelligibility and comprehensibility
• generalize communication skills across settings

To help guide their interventions, professionals will get a CD-ROM with more than 35 blank forms and sample filled-in forms, plus helpful hints, research highlights, case examples, and chapter objectives. They'll also have a step-by-step primer on monitoring each learner's performance, including an overview of different types of measurement systems and when to use each of them. The go-to guide to the latest evidence-based AAC strategies, this research-to-practice book will help improve communication—and quality of life—for learners with a range of significant disabilities.

With more than 35 forms on CD-ROM!

• Checklist to Identify Potential Reinforcers
• Intervention Planning Form
• Performance Monitoring Forms
• Free Access Preference Assessment
• Task Analysis Development and Performance Monitoring Form
• Checklist for Increasing Speed and Accuracy of Selection
• and much more

Table of Contents

Contents of the Accompanying CD-ROM

About the Authors and Contributors

Preface

Acknowledgments

I. Establishing the Framework for Intervention

1. Teaching Pragmatic Skills to Individuals with Severe Disabilities - Joe Reichle & Nancy C. Brady
2. Building Blocks of a Beginning Communication System: Communicative Modes - Susan S. Johnston & Joanna Cosbey
3. AAC Systems Features - Susan S. Johnston & Kathleen M. Feeley
4. Improving Communicative Competence Through Alternative Selection Methods - Patricia Dowden & Albert M. Cook
5. Instructional Strategies - Kathleen M. Feeley & Emily A. Jones
6. Intervention Intensity: Developing a Context for Instruction - Emily A. Jones & Kathleen M. Feeley
7. Monitoring Learner Performance - Kathleen M. Feeley & Emily A. Jones

II. Establishing Functional Communication

8. Teaching Learners to Correspond Graphic Symbols to Objects and Events - Joe Reichle & Krista M. Wilkinson
9. Gaining Access to Desired Objects and Activities - Susan S. Johnston & Joan Schumann
10. Escaping and Avoiding Objects and Activities - Emily A. Jones & Christopher E. Smith
11. Obtaining and Maintaining Communicative Interactions - Kathleen M. Feeley & Emily A. Jones
12. Using AAC to Support Language Comprehension - Emily A. Jones & Meredith Bailey-Orr
13. The Use of Augmentative Strategies to Enhance Communication of Verbal Mode Users - Kathleen M. Feeley & Emily A. Jones

Conclusion - Joe Reichle & Susan S. Johnston

Index