Literacy Matters Vol. 25 Winter 2025

for help, request something to eat, or answer questions? All of these examples incorporate literacy skills. I’ve made it my responsibility to advocate for the use of AAC within the school environment for my students because if I didn’t, no one else would. As a school-based speech-language pathologist, I play a vital role in promoting literacy skills and ensuring that all my students have the opportunity to communicate effectively and participate fully in their education. This advocacy enhances individual learning experiences and contributes to a more inclusive and supportive educational environment. Strengthening the Interprofessional Partnership How can we improve our rapport among teachers, interpreters, and ESOL teachers to ensure they utilize AAC literacy strategies effectively? First, we must educate professionals on AAC, its purpose, and how it can help students communicate successfully. Meetings are vital to discuss individual student needs, review AAC literacy strategies, and brainstorm practical approaches. For example, what is the student’s current proficiency level in literacy?Will they require modified text or assignments because of their literacy proficiency level? Howmuch scaffolding will they need?What opportunities exist to practice explicit and systematic literacy instruction with the AAC device? This promotes mutual understanding and cooperation. Second, we can provide free professional development in the form of CEUs focused on AAC-literacy strategies tailored for bi/multilingual students that teachers and paraprofessionals can take to gain more knowledge. Resources such as AAC tools, literacy materials, and culturally relevant content can be provided. Of equal importance, students’ families should be included as they are integral to communication. Third, we ensure access is provided to the student’s specific AAC tools, such as access to customizing pages, viewing data on usage, and being able to integrate the device within the curriculum (Zangari, 2019). Fourth, we can educate teachers on the importance of having realistic expectations. Using an AAC is not an easy process. It requires ongoing reflection and education on how to use the device and troubleshoot in the event of any difficulties. All teammembers must evaluate the effectiveness of AAC literacy strategies through student outcomes and feedback from teachers and interpreters. We reflect on successes and challenges to improve collaboration and implementation continuously. Fifth, we must find ways to motivate students to use their AAC devices. For example, we can incorporate stories, songs, or games that include their strengths, culture, interests, or native language (AAC Teaching Strategies, n.d.) which can help increase engagement. Lastly, we can offer teachers behavior-management strategies that can aid in AAC implementation, such as incorporating ‘guided access’ and using standard behavioral interventions, such as positive reinforcement and rewards, rather than device removal (Doan, 2019).

AAC-Literacy Strategies for Educators Through collaborative efforts with the

interdisciplinary team, we can effectively integrate literacy strategies tailored to AAC use, such as:

1. Bi/multilingual students can utilize the visual symbols on the AAC to support their comprehension of written and spoken language (Light & McNaughton, 2012). This is a valuable way to teach letter-sound correspondence so the child can hear and see what a letter looks and sounds like. The students can also see a picture, its corresponding word, and what the word says, which supports auditory, visual, and orthographic learners to build background knowledge. 2. AAC promotes inclusivity by allowing students with a native language other than English to read aloud written text in English, helping them hear the correct pronunciation and intonation (Almgren et al., 2024). The device can be used for interactive read-alouds, allowing students to listen to portions of the story and then actively participate in discussions. At the same time, the AAC can also allow students to type or select icons in their native language. The device then translates the input into English for monolingual educators, promoting inclusivity and facilitating meaningful communication. 3. Like cell phones, AAC devices also have word prediction, which can be helpful for bi/multilingual students who have difficulty predicting what should come next or how to spell a word correctly (Mezei & Heller, 2012). This can also support students building complex sentences, writing paragraphs, or just wanting to have a discussion. These devices also have built-in word banks, dictionaries, thesaurus, and revision editing. Importantly, these features can significantly improve writing fluency and proficiency. As stated, the AAC device can be tailored to the student. Not only can it be customized to the student’s native language, but it can also be tailored to their interests and literacy proficiency, which can help improve engagement (Light et al., 2021). AACs have sentence starters that can be perfect for answering questions related to books or writing tasks. For example, a student can find the folder with the sentence starters and click on an icon such as “I enjoyed reading this because…”or “I want to learn more about…”. This is a valuable support for pre-, during, or post-literacy activities. 6. Like the graphic organizers used to organize our thoughts and ideas, the AAC is similar because it is a visual tool that can help expand a student’s vocabulary knowledge. For example, the AAC is organized almost like a semantic map. You have your broader category folders like ‘clothing,’ and within the folder, you have different types of clothing (i.e., pants, shirts). When you click on a clothing item, there 5. 4.

Literacy Matters Insider Insights

Literacy Matters | Volume 23 • Winter 2023 | 31 |

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