In today’s episode I want to share my 5 tips for communicating with a nonverbal student. It is probably the question I get asked most frequently in some form or other. Many of us work with students who do not have a way to communicate effectively and don’t speak. And we also sometimes work with students who communicate in alternative ways (e.g., a device, pictures, sign language).

Have You Had This Conversation?

I’ve had this conversation with a child more times than I care to count.  Here’s the background.  I’m standing in a classroom or other facility similar.  I am here to observe and make suggestions about a child who is primarily nonverbal.  I am interacting with that child and talking to him when another student comes up and starts the above conversation.

It always sticks with me because it makes me realize that when people don’t talk verbally, as a society we tend to think they can’t understand what we are saying and we stop talking to them.  This means that a student who is already isolated by not being able to communicate effectively with others expressively, now is often surrounded by silence and people don’t interact with him or her.  This message is pretty elemental when it’s preschoolers and kindergarteners essentially saying to me that since their classmate doesn’t talk, I shouldn’t be talking to him/her.

What the Research Says

There is good research that supports the fact that when a person is nonverbal, people talk to him or her less than when a person is verbal.  They are also accepted less by peers.  There is also research to suggest that when the person has a way to effectively communicate (whether with speech, pictures, speech generating device or other means), people talk to them more.  The less people talk to you, the less you learn and the less opportunity you have for communication. Obviously this makes a bad situation worse.

The other piece at what the research tells us is that we tend to underestimate the academic skills of individuals who are non-verbal. And so people are not as challenging to them. They are not engaged in more complex language with them. And we also know that if our students are non-verbal and using a device or pictures, that our modeling with that strategy is going to be an important communication tool for them.

Tips for Helping Nonverbal Students Participate and Communicate

How do we help these students participate in the classroom?  And how do we help their peers and other adults see them as communicative partners? These are my top 5 things I want to share with teachers (and families) new to working with students who are not verbally proficient.  Talk to them like you would a typical kid.  Include him (or her) in conversations with other students.

Ask Them Questions With Nonverbal Answers

Ask them questions that they can respond to nonverbally like yes/no if they can answer that or pointing to a picture.  If they can’t discriminate pictures, give them one picture and ask them the question that just involves answering by gesturing to that one picture.

Educate Peers

Talk to your other students to remind them that just because he or she can’t talk, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk to him or her.  If you set the example of doing it, it won’t be hard for them to remember this lesson.  There are some books at the end of this post that were suggested by Facebook fans to read with other students about students who are nonverbal.

Make Sure to Talk to Them

Remember that the student can most likely still understand you, even though he or she can’t talk.  So, be careful about talking about him in front of him.  Think about whether you would say the same things around a typical child or not.  Even if you think he can’t understand, he will understand more than you expect.

Give Them a Communicative Role

Give him a role in your classroom that he can do without talking.  For instance, instead of being the calendar helper in a kindergarten, he could be the pointer for the activity.  Think about your daily schedule and try to come up with at least 1 way that this student can participate in each activity in an active manner.  What can he do besides sit and listen?

Give Communication Tools

Most important, give him or her a way to communicate.  I have a set of communication boards, for instance, that are designed specifically for activities around the classroom that can be posted or shared or used as a picture exchange. And I’ll make sure that the link to that is in this blog post as well. But you might also use something like the Picture Exchange Communication System to get him started. But even if we haven’t decided on what device to use for him, we need to make sure that we are including ways for him to communicate regularly throughout every activity of the day.

Purchase in the main post

The Impact of Giving Nonverbal Students a Voice

And finally, I want to end with a story since I began with the story. I used to work with an assistive technology team after I left internship, and I was providing consultation to 16 counties in, central North Carolina. And we were in a small town with a woman who was non-verbal and she was an adult. She was probably in her 40s. She really wasn’t interacting with people. People were not interacting with her in her workshop. We were visiting her. We gave her a device and immediately everyone was talking to her. They all flocked over to her. And the other clients were saying things like “she can talk, listen, she can talk.” And they were using the device to talk to her. So they were modeling it, which was amazing. And this all happened spontaneously. We didn’t tell them anything. We didn’t teach them anything.

So sometimes just giving a student a voice, even if they aren’t using it as effectively as we’d like them to, changes people’s expectations of them. And when we do that, they have more opportunities to practice talking and communicating. They have more opportunities for socialization, for making friends and so much more. So that’s one of the reasons why this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart.