1. Common ground in AAC: how children who use AAC and teaching staff shape interaction in the multimodal classroom.
- Author
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Ibrahim, Seray, Clarke, Michael, Vasalou, Asimina, and Bezemer, Jeff
- Subjects
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SCHOOL environment , *FACILITATED communication , *PERSUASION (Rhetoric) , *CONVERSATION , *TASK performance , *ELEMENTARY schools , *QUALITATIVE research , *SCIENTIFIC observation , *EMPIRICAL research , *DESCRIPTIVE statistics , *COMMUNICATION devices for people with disabilities , *BODY language , *SPECIAL education schools , *TEACHER-student relationships , *BODY movement , *VIDEO recording , *CHILDREN - Abstract
Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are multimodal communicators. However, in classroom interactions involving children and staff, achieving mutual understanding and accomplishing task-oriented goals by attending to the child's unaided AAC can be challenging. This study draws on excerpts of video recordings of interactions in a classroom for 6–9-year-old children who used AAC to explore how three child participants used the range of multimodal resources available to them – vocal, movement-based, and gestural, technological, temporal – to shape (and to some degree, co-control) classroom interactions. Our research was concerned with examining achievements and problems in establishing a sense of common ground and the realization of child agency. Through detailed multimodal analysis, this paper renders visible different types of practices rejecting a request for clarification, drawing new parties into a conversation, disrupting whole-class teacher talk-through which the children in the study voiced themselves in persuasive ways. It concludes by suggesting that multimodal accounts paint a more nuanced picture of children's resourcefulness and conversational asymmetry that highlights children's agency amidst material, semiotic, and institutional constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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