 Dr. von Tetschner is renowned in the field of AAC. He is working with a multidisciplinary international project involving 16 countries, becoming an aided communicator, aided language skills in children 5 to 15 years old. And what I know about Dr. von Tetschner, his whole work focuses around the development of AAC as a form of language development. And that we need to start thinking and challenging ourselves to think more developmentally about how kids are learning language when they need to do so as augmented speakers. So a couple of other little plugs. Many of you have already heard this from me, but the new book by Martine Smith and Janice Murray who are the editors, the silent partner of language interaction and aided communication has a wonderful chapter by Dr. von Tetschner and his doctoral student Christine and I'm going to mess her up her name, Stan Sklev, on constructing a language in alternative forms. And it was that chapter and ongoing dialogues with Stefan that got me the courage up to ask him to come and join us today. So I'm going to quit talking because we want you to take the lead on this. So with no further adieu, I will like to turn it over to Dr. von Tetschner. So thank you very much. I'm very pleased that I've been invited to give this talk. And as you know, I'm sitting in Norway. It's very dark outside and we are just past midnight. So it's a very good time for, you know, thinking. It's usually the best time, you know, except for those who are asleep, of course. And I will talk about, I probably have too many overheads and I probably, well, if people want the overhead so they can also send me an email, which is, you know, on the screen and in front of you. And I will be sort of talking to some of the ideas that I have in general about AC and how we can make it, as you already pointed out, a kind of language development. So this is sort of the focus and I probably will focus mainly on aided language. And I emphasize because I'm usually one of the proponents of sign language, which I think tend to be forgotten as an augmentative communication forum. And I think it's very important. And I also think that if we think about AC as language development, it should somehow be important by theories of language development rather than learning theory. And it will also be about that language development needs some kind of supportive environment, something that can support the child in developing language. I always liked the title of Andrew Locke's book, which was The Guide to Reinvention of Language, but it's an old book from 1918. Actually, she is doctoral dissertation. And also, I think it's important that the aim of AC intervention should be to promote the development of autonomy and authentic communication. I'll come back to these terms of what I put into them. And intervention may focus on scaffolding and teaching and that may be some different results. I will talk a little about our project and what kind of things you are using there. And if we have time at the end, I have some examples of children's own creations. I think that all language is a creative process when you develop language. And that means that children developing AC are sometimes using not what they learn or what they are taught, actually what they learn, but not what they are taught, and instead they have their own solutions to this. So to remind you that language development is a process by which children come to share their culture's means of communication. That, of course, will be mainly spoken and to some extent signed language. And language development is biological. It both builds on and it promotes social abilities. And I think that the underlying drive in language development is to solve engaging communicative challenges. That might sound circular, but I really think that it seems like communication is a basic activity for humans. And because it is a basic activity, we will also all the time try to engage in situations where communication will be the solution to the particular thing we are doing. But children, even though they are active language investigators, they cannot create language independently. They need guidance from the language supportive environment. Whatever that might be. I also think that the differentiation by Catherine Nelson, she talks about language internalization and externalization. And communication is we gradually internalize the communicative practices of the culture by observing and interacting with adults and children. So we have somehow to learn the language around us. And since we couldn't be innate in any way, even if you were a believer in innate nature or some kind of language acquisition device, you still have to learn the language around you. That will be the internalization. Some theories, they will talk about the cultural tool that you learn. That Catherine Nelson also says that the other thing which sort of develops in parallel is the externalized language in the sense that you're able to communicate something which is inside you which others do not know. So it is not just internalizing and copying and putting it out again. It is in some way you externalize your feelings, ideas, wishes, and makes them known to others. And this of course means that language is not imitation and repetition. That creative construction based on language experiences. So of course the point is how do you get the right kind of language experience? How do you become able to externalize not only to learn what people are doing around you, which might be difficult enough, but you can use what you learn from others to create something that is not an imitation or repetition of what somebody else did. I don't think this is very controversial. Catherine Nelson's book Young Minds in Social Worlds, I think it's a very good book by the way. So now my idea about ASC is that it presents a developmental pathway to communication and language competence. So it is one of several ways and of course it's an unusual way, it's in a typical way. And of course which means that you don't have the same kind of environment. But I also and I feel quite strongly about this that children use communication aids or manual signing because they are speech impaired. But we don't need to talk about that. We don't have to take the non-vocal, the non-speaking or something because it only tells us what they cannot do. And the aided language is not the deficit. You know, sometimes it's treated as something really bad. You know, it's like you got a flu, a really bad one. But all forms of language developed are significant achievements. And I think, you know, this is an achievement and that's why I like to talk about aided communicators. Then I know how they're communicating. We're signers. Unfortunately, no reason we cannot say like that. So and for the other reason, I'm not so happy about the complex communication needs because it doesn't tell me anything about what kind of communication is this person using. I think this is important information for me. Of course if you don't, if you use an alternative communication form it is because you have some kind of problems with speech. I mean, otherwise, you don't need to do it. So it's implied that what we really want to know and want to to admire is that you actually can learn in a different way. And you know, when the development of AC is possible it means that somehow the trial has characteristics, abilities that interact with the parameters of the assistance and makes them able to develop communication and language. Of course this may not be so difficult with the relatively high functioning cognitively high functioning children with good comprehension of spoken language which are who are just motor impaired. But of course this is also true for children with autism spectrum disorders intellectual disability. And of course it has been demonstrated many times that children with limited speech can communicate for a variety of purposes provided they are given the means of opportunity. And of course this is a big difference is that they need a planned language environment. Other children they they just swap up, you know, they they learn things just by being in the world and they learn lots of language and they probably they also learn a lot of language we don't really want them to learn. But here we have to have a plan. But I also want to emphasize that for children with severe motor impairments and you know the project that Cathy talked about is about children with severe motor impairment who are relatively high functioning. That communication and language may in fact be their best skill. They may not be able to do anything except with the language in whatever form that language may be. Now then the theories are intellectual tools for explaining typical and atypical developmental trajectories. So you know we are trying to find out you know what kind of processes they are about, how this works, what kind of abilities are underlying them, what are the connections between different abilities with experiences whatever is inborn and so on. There are many different conceptualizations of language development from, you know, the strict nativism of the Harvard people, you know, Pinker and those, Chomsky of course and over to the learning theories, you know, the who don't usually have much impact on the discussion of language development in the verbal behavior book of Skinner has mainly an historical interest. Now in the current non-nativeist theories language emerges as a result of social instruction within a biological framework. I think that is quite, you can put a lot of things into that box. And it means that the emergent language competence is a function of the child's developmental achievements and social interactions within guidance from more competent language users and the interaction partners ability to engage in conversation and create shared context. So it's about the abilities of the child, it's about how the child develops and it's about how people in the environment are able to engage in conversation and create different kinds of conversation about different things. So there is a biological foundation including the body, you know, the embodied commission and the environment can vary and some children either are very in adapted environments and this is what we're talking about. And it's, I think most people have some kind of implicit and also many explicit assumptions about language development and this of course will, for practitioners, this will determine how they try to promote language and communication. Your beliefs about what is working of course will be a guide to what you're trying to do. And there is kind of a dialogical relationship between theory formation and empirical study but it seems to be difficult to formulate a sound theory and I don't go into what a good sound theory, you know, it has to hypothesis and all kinds of things has to be testable first of all of for example aided language from observations of natural speech and aided communication and theoretical reflection and translate the theory back into practice. And the reason I say that is that it's not very much done. It's almost a little surprising how little developmental discussion and theory there is in the field of A and C there is a lot about the technical things about AIDS, about intervention and so on, but very little about what kind of process it might be. So if you have some kind of theoretical perspective, so what would be the practical implications for internalization and externalization? For example if you if you think externalization is an important process how would you try to make that possible in your intervention? So we have to think about what are the real processes. Just so you should have something else to look at in my slides which tend to be you know black and white and so on. I like this thing here which is an art and you know this is the theory and as you can see it's quite abstract. I'm not sure what you could formulate from that. This is the practice and it is about how do you go back and forth between these two. Sometimes we make very grand theories which has very little to do with the practice and they will look like that. If you wonder how you get from there this is actually a set of pictures by Roch Lichtenstein cowgoing abstract and you know when we when we see the elements and the way they're going we can actually understand how you can get from the cow to the abstract. Then again is when you have formulated the abstract how do you go back to the cow? So this was for your entertainment. Sometimes it's good to try to make little presentations of metaphors. I like that very much. Thank you. So I think one basic premise is that language developed from social interaction. I think we cannot, I don't think anybody would disagree with that. I think there might be a discussion about how that social interaction should be but it has to be created together with and then social interaction may take different forms of different qualities and I think we have to realize that some will and some will not contribute to development. They don't have to be bad. I'm not talking about that but there are some that will and some that will not and I think that intervention with AC that the important thing is that it should support authentic communicative interaction. Authentic by this I mean that it is a communication that comes from the child and which is not something the child has been told by the other person to say or to repeat or to relay and the other person already knows and this may sound trivial because we do this all the time. You know we tell stories, we listen to other people's stories. All the time we are communicating about things we didn't know and we are attending school and so on but it is not surprisingly it is not much researched you know what how that process is. It's sort of used as a kind of game sometimes, a barrier game but it's not really research. So when we go back to the language environment it is it has to have a language acquisition support system and this is not what Bruno called it you know that and you probably know that this is what he said that when Chomsky said that children have to have a language acquisition device a lad then Bruno said that a lad needs a lassie so and that was the language acquisition support system it was a lass and the language environment is children's main source of language practice. They learn how linguistic expressions are used in their conventional use and how they may be used correctly. You know you do that by seeing how others are solving their ways of communicating with others and again the language support in the environment should not only be something that supports the child's effort in a language support environment communication language should be affordances in a Gibsonian sense that's an action possibility you know Gibson says that when we see the world we don't see squares and rounds and and so on and but we see the meaningful things but also we see what we could do so for us the when we can walk the floor would be walkable for a fly the roof would be walkable the ceiling would be walkable I mean so there should be affordances where we should be able to perceive the world as possible for communication and language and of course most children grow up in an environment that supports language development and is communicatively accessible now communicative access is a term we developed because you know politicians and others were all the time talking about physical access we have rules for how tall buildings can be before they have an elevator we have rules for the pavements so that they slope so you can easily get on with wheelchairs and and also the children parents with children in the wagon they can go easily so there are many good things about that and so communicative access in a way is a parallel to that and it means that there is an environment that acknowledges the child's need for alternative means of communication and provides the child with a language form that the child is able to use for expression so this is part of part of that then there must be people in the environment who understand the child expressing communication and can answer in a way that the child understands that may be spoken language but it may also have to be in the child's own form depending on you know again the comprehension of language by the child and communicative access also means that there are people in the environment who master the child's language better than the child so they can scaffold the child's language form and from whom the child can learn so this is inaccessible it doesn't mean that that all children will develop to very very high level this this will depend but communicative access means that it will be possible for the child to learn from the environment the language environment will be supportive so you will have as good a language development as may be possible I am I like to bring in the macro level on this and maybe because we are a little proud of that in Norway in 2012 August 1st actually when we were in Pittsburgh and the law of education in Norway got a new paragraph about the rights of people developing AAC and it saves that students who are completely apart in a lacking functional speech and in need of augmentative alternative communication should be allowed to use suitable forms of communication and the necessary means of communication for education so and the important thing is that this is in chapter two of the law of education in Norway and the chapter two is not about special education it's about language we have other minorities we have people who speak the Sami language we have people who speak Kuens which is actually Finnish so that and we have people who are deaf and use sign language so they have special rights when it comes to education they may or may not need special education but here it is only about whether they need or not the communication form the important thing about this is that the schools are now responsible for making the schools accessible in the sense that there must be somebody who knows the communication form of the child well enough for the child to function optimally in the school and if the student does not benefit satisfactorily from ordinary education you know even if not speaking or will not be able to do so the student has the right to special education according to the rules in chapter five so the chapter five is about special education and we have you know we have a general education law for everybody and education you know a C might be part of the special education but the right to use it and that you actually can require that there is somebody in the school who knows your communication form best and of course it is essentially would also mean that the other children in the school would have to learn it this is now in the law education we work together with the the Department of Education and we were very happy with with this law and it's Kathy I want to interrupt you for a moment I I just think this is a remarkable law especially given that it is a access to language focus and we have some accessibility legislation that focuses primarily on vision and deafness although it's also primarily more around adults but this law is it unique to Norway do you know I've never heard of anything quite so I want to say quite so wonderful as this do you know if the other countries are adopting this or is Norway I think we are the only one who have this law but of course I I couldn't be sure about that you know it's a good idea so somebody else might also have the idea yes well we hope so good thank you sorry just for your interest so you can see here that it's in Norwegian I thought that might be interesting for you to to learn a little Norwegian and and there is also a law for for adults so this this is another chapter which has to do with with adults who are also lacking functional speech they also have you know the these rights so but at this I do the education which is a different thing but it was also introduced at the at the same time the link on the bottom is to the Norwegian laws but I think you have to read Norwegian yes thank you for translating it to me there's a question from the chat as well people are asking does that mean that they get funding as well I'm thinking for devices supports and services because I know that there are people here who are struggling to access funding especially for equipment but I would also think given what you're talking about in terms of accessible communication funding to support that so there is with the law is the law supported by educational dollars in in Norway as well yes and it was it the funding was never a problem not no this had the funding was not particularly related to this law love it funding because you know if you really need a communication aid it's free yeah and and if you need help in school it's free you know in we very often find the long discussions about funding a little bit boring because it's essentially taken care of you know we are a social democratic welfare state so it it doesn't mean that everything is perfect far from but it means that these kinds of things are generally going all right it's always a problem when you are sort of not you know on the on the border of some kind of benefit but when you clearly need it it's not a problem that's lovely to hear as well thank you so here's another Norwegian for you and and that if you go back from them from the marker level which I really think is important to the micro level you know proper then we go back to the scaffolding and the and scaffolding will be the support of children's problem solving development provided by parents and other adults and children will talk much more about it and and I sort of talk about communicative problem solving is just coping with situations that require communication it doesn't mean that you know you have a sort of special task or something but everyday problems or challenges or things you have to do in everyday life they will be full of communicative problem solving we do that all the time and of course there have to be some more competent members and you you may know that the the original the scaffolding metaphor came from this task where then some mothers of young children should help their child to build a copy of this little tower and the help the mothers were given were sort of called scaffolding because you know it's scaffold went well with that but I I like to to think that we should not be too limited in our thinking about scaffold so children who have different strengths and difficulties would need different kinds of scaffold and you know you can have this sort of quite simple one here we have a little bigger one and an even more large larger one and and quite impressive so they come in all kinds the basis of thinking scaffolding is and this of course is the God's good theory although you know many other people talk about it is that it's the child who is driving the learning process so it's it's different from teaching because in the teaching it's the adult who's driving the the process and of course I think teaching is good for for many things but it's a it's a different kind of process and and I think that when here is about what is the point of the environment well the environment is something that the child needs to cope with with for different reasons it has to investigate it it has to master it in different ways but it's also the the world that the is is helping the child so it's it's it's both for something the child is investigating learning about and it's something that helps you learn to child in that process so children are trying to make sense of the physical and social world and scaffolding is helping them to do that and it's the children search for meaning and then it's the difference in competence between children and people in the community so you have more competent people and they can guide you in your search for meaning in the world and this is the main source of through important cultural relevant knowledge including knowledge about words and sentences so you know this is the humans are are social beings but they are social beings in so many ways you know we we talk a lot about attachment and so on attachment is also because it makes it possible for us to investigate the world in a safe way but the other side of attachment is always exploration and i think we can in a way it's a little bit about like the internalization externalization we have to learn about we have to learn the language but then we have to use it in different ways we have to learn about the we have to learn about the world and we use what we learn about the world to investigate the world so it goes back and forth and i think we we miss something if we don't have both sides of that process one of the things is that much of the communication of young age communicators is part of routines where they don't really have a true responsibility you know it's like the father who who said and so was there an animal animal in school today was there a dog you know i know it because it was in the book so the child didn't really have to do anything but smile and indicate yes or something of course the he was not the driver of this communication he was just acknowledging it and way being happy interacting with his father but but there wasn't really any communicative responsibility in it so the question is you know how could we support the child in becoming an active agent and the driving force in ac development i know it's a little romantic to say you know and of course there are lots of difficulties in in saying that but i still believe there are there are ways where they could do it so it's not like saying the right thing it is having something to say that i would like to know so the child needs real communicative problems to solve and the adult should be able to guide the child's own attempt to solve the problem so it's it's not to sort of teach something and and and you know this is one of my things that i am concerned about i think it's that too much of the research and it's not that it's not valuable to do research and that is you know we describe a child we teach the child something and then we find out that the child learned what we taught which is not that it's actually better than if the child doesn't learn it but here it is not only about teaching and whether the child can do that but it is are we actually able to guide the child when the child is trying to solve a problem that we might not even know what is in the beginning and i think that if we focus too much on routines and repetitions it may not foster creativity and productivity in language use and and particularly i'm thinking now much about aided communicators who are particularly disabled so much of their time or the day is full of routines and repetitions and things take a very very long time and i've sometimes spent some some days on summer camps with severely disabled children and it takes a long you know the breakfast getting up and i mean i've been to some account myself when i was a little boy and you know we just got up ate food and was out doing most things we could without anybody noticing us and here there is so much routine and repetition this may be good for children with autism spectrum disorders but it shouldn't be for everybody so scaffolding implies that true social interaction is necessary to enhance development and the education in general so again i i think we should have a greater focus on the authentic communication and co-construction that leads to scaffolding practice so that you know children can develop and more broader and actually use of their communicative resources now the important thing about scaffolding you see that the child must understand the task essentially that means that it has to be within the sonoproximal development but i'm sure you're all familiar with the the lower end on the sonoproximal development is when the child cannot do it on its own but he can do it with help the upper limit is when the child doesn't understand the task if the child doesn't understand the task of what it's about then you can do it a hundred times and you can solve it for the child but the child will not learn from that so it must be meaningful for the child to be active and to attempt to solve communicative problems with ac so that can be scaffolded so and we should be aware that co-construction is a common element in conversation involving ac but it is not often that it is often non scaffolding helps so you might have to help the children so the question is is your co-construction solving the problem here and now or is it actually helping the child to become a better communicator this is the whole idea about scaffolding is that it supports development it's it's not so much that it helps you here now to to do this particular problem or solve it and do a task which might be okay but the question is whether it is for the future the child will become a better communicator and that means that if we are going to be able to scaffold we have to understand the nature of the child's contribution we have to know that now the child is not actually contributing very much because we know it all then we have to know when the child is knowing the is believing the conversation and we are trying to see what we can do to help and a lack of such understanding I think would be a hindrance scaffolding ac development we have been been trying to to look at some of these things in in our project that's becoming made speaker and essentially much of it is about how are children both typically children who speak naturally and aided communicators five to 15 years so when they are communicating to another person something that the other person kind of see how do they do it you know we of course it's a much easier task for speaking children so they are in a way doing more of the task but this is not important we are much more interested in how they do it so one of the things is that they are showing a picture kind of a visual scene with some content and you may see this is one of them and you should realize that it's drawn by Janis Murray who is in in our project we're very lucky to have a really good artist and so this is a scene that's quite easily described while this one will give children and a lot of the problems and of course it's borrowed from Magrit but it is much more difficult to describe because you cannot use the the partner cannot use an ordinary scenario and what we see of is that the the partner tries to take over in what they believe is you know in they're trying to be helpful they're trying to solve the problem but they're not paying so much attention to what the child is contributing sometimes really we're getting it we also have another type where the child is using instructing and constructing we call it which is kind of play and it means that the child again has a model the partner cannot see and the communication partner is instructed for example to the rest of the doll we have different one so the the doll you see and it's not so ordinary it's actually all that doll you see is the one who is in the child box and the rest of the stuff is what the partner has and the child has to to put on whatever the child says and and the child can of course watch the other the adult and correct and monitor and and all kinds of things and we have it we we think that children often cannot play motor disabled children cannot play because they cannot you know do the all the physical stuff that if they use language for action they can do the same things but only somebody else is doing the physical and and i think this is something that children should be quite you know who are aided communicators they they should be quite skilled so we would actually thought that maybe they would be better than the normally speaking children but they were not i'm not showing your results because we we are writing these things up but what we saw was that many of the children were creative but they were also lacking experience with telling about unknown things and they were really bad at elaborating and clarifying the message when they were not understood because you know they have such a limited vocabulary you know most of them were not writing you know with the with letters and and even if when they were they they were not that good spellers you know so to to get around so and when you have a limited vocabulary where you actually have to use a lot of your vocabulary uh to say much more than we do with each word to to put it that way then you don't have so many synonyms you don't have so many substitution it's not so easy just to you know construct a new message which might be a lightning that of course means that it's not so easy to find exactly what the other person needed so we think that this is is not something that they were good at and we think that the environment it it's much more that the the adult takes the for example a lego block which we will to use and says um should i take this one should i place it here and the child only has to say yes and no and never gets to say that take that one put it there build this do this and in a way the environment fails to utilize the children's best skill which is language in these cases so they get you know into new kinds of participation with this and of course they learn language by doing this and they and they learned uh and the important thing of this is they learn when they are successful in their communication they learn when did it work when didn't it work what then you can come on and you can sort of scaffold and say oh well maybe you could say it like this and that and uh but it it shouldn't be sort of too much about uh correcting over time here the is the co-construction is you know a difficult it's a different thing and the co-construction should be messages the partner doesn't know beforehand because that's a very different process and you know when i'm helping you doesn't take too much time i i you know i want to help you i know what you want to say so i i just get passed through it because these the i think one of the things that there is not so much research on things like this is that it actually takes a very very long time and um we also found it interesting that many of the teachers special teachers they they really like the tasks and and they would like to use them in the classroom take oh i could do this you know and i say yeah you can just make your own and you can make it with peers you can do it with this and it's a good thing when you have communication with peers because um i always like to book by merchants of sound which was called after the children and one of the things that these were speaking children that physically disabled in wheelchairs and say they felt less disabled when they were helped by peers than when they were helped by assistants so by introducing peers uh and doing things together with peers it was all right to be helped and the peers you know they knew them so it was all right and i think this here also is the truth we we had some very good conversation with with the children in class but of course the the the competence asymmetry that i talked about before which is sort of the the basics for the scaffolding is both larger and smaller it's larger because other people can speak because they are able to speak they of course have a much larger repertoire they can talk about all kinds of things but it's more because other people have only marginally higher and i think sometimes even lower alternative language competence and the children so it's not so easy that the person who is scaffolding should ideally be more competent than the child we have some examples of the the teacher and the child you know learning together sort of in parallel and that has also been very good but of course you you have to be a teacher who who really can manage that kind of of situation and of course to do this you should know about the typical and atypical developmental course of the child's communication form so how is it that children become a communicators what can they do at different times one of the things that we see when we when we look at descriptions of children using communicationated or other forms of communities say oh he has a communication aid he may have a certain vocabulary he has so and so many signs but if the child has speech it will be a long description of the child's sounds which words and and sentences and and of course tests and things but the communication form the child is actually doing uh using is is not really described and of course it it it just shows it has a different kind of stages local scaffolding is an unfolding process i think this is a problem that we see very often that the what what the parents and others should be reduced or changed so if you don't have scaffolding it might hinder a child's learning but when you have unnecessary help and encouragement it may function the opposite to scaffolding reduce the child's self-criticism and feeling of competence because you know we there is a tendency for for praising for everything particular for children who are disabled but a praise in means that now you transgress or you you you were better than you were usually you know when when we are but our praising children it is because they did something that we didn't think they could do or or at least we know they have been striving with it and and so on and and so when you praise for something that is not really special then you are in a way saying oh can you really do this i didn't think you could do it and i will not go into that but i'm going to interject a little bit i hear people often saying oh good talking or so that's what you're that's in a very yeah yeah there are different aspects of this you know this was one aspect about you know the it implies an evolution what the child can do right but the other thing is that if you say good communication you are not answering the child you are you are giving the child a grade in in fact school and in school and they have a book about international communication and they say and i don't know if there are many pedagogues here but they they say that well if you if you speak to people you get an answer if you speak to a pedagogue you get a grade nice i'm terrible i don't know what to say about that but yeah yeah yeah and and so and and the person who says or said that you shouldn't praise people for communicating is skinner because he says that and and you know for once i agree with skinner he says that the idea about communication is that it should lead to some kind of reply from the other you know successful communication means that somebody will answer you or do something or whatever you know that you might be but you don't talk to be praised and therefore you you stopped the you stopped the situation before it has come to the end so it's just a meta's comment which has nothing to do with the communication i'm gonna have a slide on that a little later so we will come back to that and i also think that and as i already talked about this there are some scaffolding and some non scaffolding assistance and i scaffolding is not just help it must support development and non scaffolding assistance can be useful or necessary you know you help children with solving problems you know you they you might help them with things they will never be able to do but then it's a it's a different kind of things and it's it's all right but you must be be sure that when you are trying to develop the Thai language are you giving that kind of help that actually will help the Thai later and it's not it's the competence it's not the increasing frequency it's very strange we have this very often that they show how many times they used it and and so on and of course we know it is possible to influence languages by reinforcement and sometimes you know that can that can be useful but you don't teach that you don't teach language with that that is another thing and you and when you take away the reinforcement till an individual will not lose the ability to communicate he might do it less but it's not about the learning it's not about the competence it's only about what he's actually doing and then of course you have to ask what kind of things should we do that would promote what the child is doing and and again you know this is something about the same but some function some interventions focus more on forms than on function on producing or increasing a frequency of a response or avoiding some kind of unwanted behavior rather than on developing the child's possibility to realize communicative intentions you see there we have we we can have different goals with what you're doing and I don't say that all non-scare folding interventions are good or bad that we should be aware when we're doing this and the others now some of the things that we do often is to some extent good and that for example we focus a lot of choice early intervention is often a focus on choice making which is not bad because of course it's it's good for the child to be able to make some decisions in light to communicate but communication has many more functions than how much should you choose so when choice is established I think scaffolding should focus more on the child communicating something about interesting people animals things actions events in different situations with different communication partner and for different purposes so choice might be good in the beginning and and of course but when you can do your choice you don't have to learn it again and again you rather have to learn you know what kind of symbols would mean and what can you use them for and you can use them to communicate about different things of course there are children who can only learn choice and may stop there but I don't think that is it's really necessarily that many and also the when you scaffold the expression of choices related to needs that in most homes are limited and fulfilled through everyday routines and they may not have so much communicative value as supporting structured conversation and narratives you know telling about things and in different ways and also the when you choose something and you get it with the activity or something else the communication is over you know you it very often does not lead on to other things so so again this is about you know and it's it's it's not the only thing you do and and of course it's important for the child to to do choices but it may not be something you have to focus so much of the scaffolding on it might be other things which will be more important so after you move on and again I'm going to just interject here again I know that we've had people like Linda Burkhardt and people come to Alberta who are really working with some of our most challenged children and you know one of the things that she's reminded me and I think others have is that if a child doesn't make a choice it might be that they're making a choice that those aren't the things that they want and that we are really potentially potentially making judgments based on very poor very poor inputs rather than giving them you know our talking child could negotiate or say I don't want any of those or whatever so I really appreciate your also talking about the limits of doing choice making as an AAC intervention so thank you well thank you so and and then I try to to distinguish between teaching and scaffolding and and as I said earlier the teaching is is often important part of AAC interventions because you know it has to be planned in a different way we have to provide the children so the teaching can be very good but again I would like it to sort of support the ordinary processes so that the teaching is not sort of having its own life independent on what is the the the daily communications of the child and interact social interactions with with other people you know I think the teaching somehow should support that and you know and and we may be in a good situation to to find out what we should teach the child the child cannot fully decide his own teaching I know if children decided their own teaching probably we go back to the Stone Age so we must have adults who make some decisions as well so when I'm talking about scaffolding it is because that is part of the child's activity that what the child is running in addition to that we also have direct teaching but then it's not scaffolding and I know that in many articles they are writing educational articles in many journals the educational article they call in the scaffolding I think it is not really that kind of process that they usually describe it's very adult-centered instead of child-centered teaching also sometimes means that the child would have to perform things he doesn't understand and then we should be aware of that although we have this expression in Norway about dry teaching it essentially comes from swimming so you do the swimming movements on land so that you should be able to swim as as you know it's much better to learn to swim in water than to do it on the on the land so dry teaching typically leads to dry and limited competence so again you know if you can do things in the ordinary situations it will be a better thing then of course it's about the competence to scaffold you know that again scaffolding is based on the assumption that adults actually are aware of when children need and do not need help and the kind of help they need and I think this may not always be the case for children developing ASC and as you probably all know there are many studies showing that ASC is not much used at home and I think the the reason British study where 75 percent of the children were not using ASC in the home I think there are different reasons for that but I think it may also be because the parents have have not been sort of helped to get the right kind of competence to do the scaffolding and we interviewed parents here and I interviewed parents before but much of the teaching that the teaching of parents in my experience is the technical things they learn about how you know which of course is important when particularly when children have electronic aids and and then they they learn teaching so they they learn in a little way to be teachers and and when I say what do you do to supervise the parents or they can come here anytime they want and see what we do sort of implying that the parents would like to do the same things that they do in school but you know school is work so at home you should be able to use communication for other purposes so at least that may be part of the course it is also that they have routines they know each other and the parents decide and there are lots of things to do so I think it's not I would I don't want to be simple minded about you know why it's not so much use at home but I think that it also has to do with the competence of the scaffolding so Stefan I need to I'm sorry I'm interpreting you it's five so I want to tell people that if you need to go and I know you might we are recording this but I don't want to yeah so just just to let you know and and I also really want to also say at this point that I know I get lots of people saying well the families aren't going to use it at home so why should we do this but I I think as you pointed out it is a complex issue that perhaps may be part of our own processes and teaching of and supporting of families that create that so I mean good yes and and I think of you know it I think this is always a complex issue as you say and but but I also think that if they don't do it at home then you say why should I do it in school why should I do you know this scaffolding a help and help the peers and so on but the moment you get on the parents may see that they actually might need it sometimes and besides if the child doesn't learn it at home he doesn't learn it at school where should he learn it should we just say well if the parents don't want to be supportive with you we will not support you either so I I think we just have to to go on as you as I think you know I'm quite a lot in China and in in in China I was very surprised to to discover that they don't think communication is important I think in most other places I've been I if I talk about you know alternative communication which I do often they they uh I you know then the child's need for for communication and the importance of communication is life is something like a pep talk I just mentioned which I think that I'm just saying things that they know and agree with anyway but in China I have to time out that it is really bad for and mentioning all the bad things that happened you know with challenging behaviors and not that you don't learn so much and so all kinds of things that happen when you are not giving the kind of of communication that you can use this they understand but the communication in in itself so of course that means that when we are working on it it's the teachers who are doing a lot of that but we think it slowly will also go to the homes and then we have examples of the homes being the good ones where they are doing things and the teachers not so good so we have it in both sides well one of the things that I'm particularly concerned about is the is that we should promote competence in sibling and peers and not making them into teachers I think sometimes when when we see that they have been training peers it's often about attitudes which of course is good in a sense and also making them into mini teacher or they they they mirror the teachers that they take that role and I think that they they are I think that particularly with younger children it's very often easy to get them alone and make them competent and I think that it's better to make them competent that will change attitude than to try to change attitude without changing confidence first when they feel familiar with it when they get to know it when you explain about there's something about the brain and they can communicate in this way many young children do do really well so I think that the children are an important part of each other's environment and for the typical developing children the peers getting more and more important with age this is less so because of the other physical dependencies that the children may have but still the the peers can be extremely important but we have to realize that they have to have to learn also and then they will be naturally natural scaffolders and this is what I talked about before um about the the reward and you know praise or and we think it's important that we distinguish between communicative success which essentially means being understood and get an answer to to whatever you are communicating and uh instrumental success would mean obtaining something I think this is particularly in the peaks and other sort of intervention based on behavior analysis they are more concerned with instrumental success and communicative success and and it's very typical that many children who are taught you know in with more behavior interventions they they don't take no for an answer with communicative success I think things are getting much easier so it's uh if they know they are being understood because they are very used to not being understood so they will just repeat you know until they they hopefully will have instrumental success but we think communicative success is important and communication should be met with communication and you know they should you should not praise good communication is it's not so here's what I'm going to do guys I'm going to summarize a couple of things that I've heard and I'm going to ask um Dr. Ventescher to perhaps give a um more feedback to us or if you guys are interested you can tell me that to come back and finish his wonderful presentation um so here's my big takeaway so I'm going to do a little bit of a summary um we need to really be focusing on the environment on doing work to have ensure that we have more capable others who are able to scaffold for us to be thinking about kids who are also and people in the environment who are also speaking my language if I'm an augmented speaker I love his idea of peer supports I need to ask him how they actually bring peers in and intentionally teach those kids the uh language systems of the augmented speakers um lots of focus on scaffolds rather than direct teaching um but maybe most important and guiding not correcting but my big takeaway from Professor Ventescher is that we need to think about this developmentally in the way that we know kids learn that we know um from uh developmental psychology theories that we need to be approaching this and that we need to be focusing on providing language not AAC I will find out from Dr. Ventescher what happened and we will certainly um if you are interesting interested try and get him back yeah Amy and other folks I could listen to him all day I also highly recommend a couple to buy those books because it is such a different way of thinking about AAC than than many of us have uh thought about in in North America I think and my question to Stefan was going to be why do you think we in the world of rehabilitation medicine special education seem to be seem to gravitate so much to behavioral approaches