Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 2013; 29(1): 1–2 © 2013 International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication ISSN 0743-4618 print/ISSN 1477-3848 online DOI: 10.3109/07434618.2013.767487
GUEST EDITORIAL
AAC Practices in Everyday Interaction MICHAEL CLARKE & STEVEN BLOCH Augment Altern Commun Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by University College London on 12/11/14 For personal use only.
University College London, UK
It is almost 30 years since the publication of Arlene Kraat’s state-of-the-art report on communicative interaction involving people provided with communication aids (Kraat, 1985). Kraat’s crucial report highlighted the diversity of approaches used to investigate social interactions, and for the first time drew attention to many core features and concepts that characterize social interaction in the AAC field, such as the co-construction of aided contributions, the impact of the communication partner, and the influence of technology on interaction. While the years immediately following Kraat’s publication saw only gradual developments in AAC-related social interaction research, by default the enduring relevance of social interaction as a defining outcome of AAC provision has precipitated a continuing need for research in this area. This special issue brings together a collection of papers concerned specifically with the everyday practices of social interaction involving adults and children with communication disabilities. Common to each paper is the use of conversation analysis (CA; Sidnell, 2010) as an empirical and inductive method used to establish how participants organize various facets of interaction. Each paper provides a summary of CA’s practices, but readers unfamiliar with these methods are strongly advised to read first Higginbotham and Engelke’s informative primer on the principles and practices of talkin-interaction research. Higginbotham and Engelke discuss the methodological roots of talk-in-interaction research, before providing a tutorial on undertaking micro-analysis of naturally occurring interactions. Defining the scope of the AAC field is far from straightforward, particularly in the context of interpersonal interaction research. The papers in this special issue embrace a rich definition of AAC that incorporates formal communication aid systems (e.g., voice output communication aids), conventional semiotic systems (e.g., handwriting) as well as unaided resources
(e.g., gesture), and includes commonplace objects (e.g., teaching materials).While the breadth of communicative modalities considered is varied, each paper emphasizes how they are integrated within a diverse multimodal ecology of interactive resources that are deployed and co-ordinated by participants to accomplish their interpersonal interactions. As such, AAC is conceptualized (and realized) as an inherently interpersonal business, incorporating the co-ordinated actions of all active participants in interaction. For example, Norén and colleagues examine the use of communication aid technology, focussing on how the physical practices of touchscreen AAC use can have material consequences for the interaction, that is how, in the moment-by-moment unfolding of the interaction, the very act of pointing to the touch screen, and the hierarchical organization of vocabulary on the device, impact on how the interaction develops. The use of communication aid technology also frames Clarke and colleagues’ examination of turn exchange. Here the authors provide a focused examination of ways in which two children orient to and manage speaker transfer from an ongoing VOCA-mediated contribution to the next turn by the child with natural speech. This analysis of the deceptively straightforward activity of speaker transfer sheds light on issues related to delays in conversational interaction, and the use of eye gaze as an interactional resource. Bloch and Clarke address a longstanding but underresearched area of AAC that concerns the use of handwriting in interaction as a low-tech AAC system. The authors examine ways in which handwritten contributions to conversation may be delivered and received in interactions between people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis/motor neuron disease (ALS/MND) and their significant others. The analysis of unaided iconic gesture in interaction is also under-represented in AAC research. In this special issue, Wilkinson examines the uses and limitations of iconic gesture as an interactive
The two authors are guest editors of this special issue. Correspondence: Michael Clarke, Developmental Science Department, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, UK. Tel: ⫹ 44 (0)207 679 4253. E-mail:
[email protected]
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Augment Altern Commun Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by University College London on 12/11/14 For personal use only.
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M. Clarke & S. Bloch
resource in conversation between an adult with severe Broca-type aphasia and a speech and language therapist. Wilkinson’s analysis highlights important issues concerning benefits and limitations of iconic gesture use, and, for example, how the interactional features of gesture use can differ from spoken turns in interaction. In the final paper in this issue, Korkiakangas and Rae illustrate, in fine detail, how teachers manipulate objects to provide opportunities for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to display visual alignment and involvement with educational activities. This paper provides a fresh perspective on the ways in which interactions are “aided,” by focusing on teachers’ subtle manoeuvring of teaching materials in coordination with children’s behaviours and aspects of their talk, to engage children with ASD in ongoing activities. The presentation of interaction in the form of transcription is a key element of CA-inspired research papers, and each manuscript in this issue provides multiple examples of detailed transcription that is sensitive to the sequential, turn-by-turn realization of conversational interaction, and the particular phenomena under scrutiny. In a recent article, von Tetzchner and Basil (2011) propose notation for representing modalities of AAC use in conversation. The papers in this issue have adopted von Tetzchner and Basil’s system and have combined it with notation commonly used in CA. For example, the use of left-sided and right-sided brackets allow for the illustration of co-occurring events. Novel conventions have been used where clashes occur between AAC and CA notations, and some authors have included discrete notations to support clarity of transcriptions, for example Korkiakangas and Rae’s transcription of time. Overall, it is the drive to provide highly detailed
yet intelligible transcriptions that illustrate the phenomena of interest for each paper that informed decisionmaking about minor variation between manuscripts in the use of certain transcription conventions. We hope also that in addition to the careful representation of common AAC modalities, the transcripts provide a useful illustration of key aspects of interaction, such as cooccurring events, that might relevantly be incorporated into future presentations of conversational interaction in the AAC journal. Interpersonal interaction is central to our lives, and supporting best possible interpersonal interaction for people with communication disabilities underpins the entire AAC field. We hope therefore that readers find this collection of papers informative and thought provoking. Finally, we are grateful to Ann Sutton, the authors, and the anonymous reviewers who generously contributed their time and expertise to this issue.
Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
References Kraat, A. (1985). Communication interaction between aided and natural speakers: A state of the art report. Toronto: Canadian Rehabilitation Council for the Disabled. Sidnell, J, (2010). Conversation analysis: An introduction. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. von Tetzchner, S., & Basil, C. (2011). Terminology and notation in written representations of conversations with augmentative and alternative communication. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 27, 141–149.
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