BIO

Emma is a South Florida resident and current undergraduate student at Florida State University. She is majoring in Communication Science and Disorders with a minor in Child Development. Emma has a passion for working with people of all ages with disabilities as well as augmentative and alternative communication devices (AAC) which inspired her to pursue a career as a speech language pathologist. In addition to research, Emma is involved in a nonprofit organization that fosters relationships between people of all abilities called the Friendship Journey, the National Student Speech Language Hearing Association, Dance Marathon at FSU, and Phi Mu.

Measuring Teacher Communication with Children with IDD During Shared Story Reading

Abstract

This study focuses on preschool children with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD) and how teachers communicate with them during shared story reading. This project aims to identify the most common communication forms, functions, and strategies teachers use when communicating with children with IDD. Two whole-group shared reading activities that included 15 teachers and 15 children with limited speech ability and their classmates were video recorded and transcribed. We aimed to better understand how teachers communicate with students with disabilities and how it can be improved upon to better support kids who have a wide range of support needs. Videos were transcribed and coded using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) by adapting an existing validated measure of shared storybook reading, the Systematic Assessment of Book Reading (SABR). Preliminary data indicates that the most common type of communication form teachers use is speech, the majority of teachers choose to read verbatim, and common communication strategies documented included gestures/pointing, wait time, and modeling vocabulary. Full coding and transcription of shared reading videos will provide quantitative data to support these findings.

Keywords: speech, communication, disabilities, reading