AAC-Mediated Classroom Participation: Calling On and Coming Back

Students who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems experience participation barriers in fast-paced classroom discussions due to the extensive time required to compose and formulate contributions with AAC relative to spoken language. One instructional practice educators use is to call on a student who uses an AAC system to prepare a contribution while instruction continues and then come back for the student's response later. The principles of conversation analysis were used to record, transcribe, and analyze use of this call-on-and-come-back practice by a teacher and a speech and language pathologist during group instruction with a boy who used AAC. Using a participation framework, the analysis suggests the call-on-and-come-back practice did little to address the participation barriers and instead introduced new challenges to participation using an AAC system. Given that this practice promoted student exclusion, disengagement from the group discourse, competing demands for attention, and missed learning opportunities, caution should be used when considering its use with children who use AAC systems.