#TalkingAAC 2025

Early in my career supporting emergent communicators, I relied on the prompt hierarchy to guide me.  Unfortunately, the outcome was often students who were completely dependent upon me to show or tell them what to say. What I was doing wasn’t resulting in autonomous communication, which I knew was the goal, and  I needed to change. In this session we will explore the reasons why we rely on prompts when teaching AAC and how prompting can interfere with autonomous communication. We will also apply basic knowledge of prelinguistic skills (engagement, joint attention, motivation, etc.) and expressive language development to determine appropriate goals and strategies for emergent communicators. Finally we will discuss strategies to assist prompt dependent AAC users to reduce their reliance on prompts and begin to generate their own messages by choosing motivating, open ended, student led activities.