DSL+

Guest lecture by Débora Deliberato

at the Department of Special Needs Education

University of Oslo

19. January 2015

Débora Deliberato is an associate Professor in speech pathology at the Department of Special Needs Education - Säo Paulo State University. During her visit to Norway and the University of Oslo Professor Deliberato held a lecture about her work and research in the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). She describes her intervention programme for children with special needs in the mainstream classroom. By implementing a five step programme the goal is to find a functional communication system for the child. The five steps are; 1) assessment of the child’s communication skills, 2) implementation of a communication system, 3) vocabulary expansion, 4) phrase structure and 5) expanding the utterance of different themes using graphic and written language. The aim is for the child to be able to communicate with several communication partners and in the different arenas of importance for the specific child. This is only possible if the intervention is highly individualized and the collaboration between the habilitation services, the school and the family is of special importance. Professor Deliberato also gave examples of how you can use AAC - systems to make educational material suitable for all children, not only the child with special needs. The child’s pairs are important communication partners, and the professor emphasizes the benefits of the pairs learning how to use the communication system of the child with special needs.

We wish Débora Deliberato good luck with her further work.

Written by Silje Hokstad