Teachers’ enhanced ability to include non-speaking students in multi-party classroom interaction with focus on knowledge generation

Teachers have an overall responsibility for providing an environment that can enhance inclusion and knowledge exchange.

Accordingly, they are responsible for including the approximately 10 percent of students who have speech and language impairments. Students who lack speech can use a picture-based communication board or a speech generating device for communication.

Yet, using a board or an SGD is time consuming: it might take more than a minute for the student to produce a question or an answer.

The production time is often silent and dealing with this in-turn silence can be challenging for the student, the teacher, and the classmates. Another barrier is the restricted vocabulary on the board or the SGD.

Inclusion and participation in multi-party classroom interaction presumes that teachers have predicted and secured that students have a relevant vocabulary at hand on the board or the SGD.Research on what practices, classroom organisation, and vocabulary that facilitate board/SGD-mediated classroom interaction is scares, but emerging.

Previous research found that both teachers and students experience difficulties: boards or SGDs are seldom used in the classroom. Consequently, there is a risk that these students’ opportunity to be included is strongly restricted. The project comprices two studies.

The first study generates new knowledge on what practices, organisation, and vocabulary that facilitate board or SGD-mediated classroom interaction. The second study will be a workshop, based on the findings in study 1.

Teachers’ perceived self-efficacy to scaffold board/SGD-mediated classroom interaction and their perception of the teaching format of the workshop will be evaluated.