Common ground in AAC: how children who use AAC and teaching staff shape interaction in the multimodal classroom

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.

Keywords:

• AAC
• agency
• common ground
• conversational asymmetry
• multimodal communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). This article is partly based on a Ph.D. dissertation completed in 2020 by the first author.

Notes

1 Notation convention hereafter in line with von Tetzchner & Basil, 2011).

2 Event is deliberately used to segment interactions into multimodal units. We acknowledge that in their original reference, Müller and Soto (2002) used discourse unit; however, in the current article, we avoid using discourse to avoid any linguistic associations connected with our multimodal perspective.

Additional information

Funding

This work has received funding via an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Studentship and ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, under grant numbers ES/J500021/1 and ES/P000592/1, awarded to the first author.