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Handicapped Students Learn Language Skills with Communication Boards

• Inadequate language development is one of the most limiting deficits of many mentally handicapped students. Teachers and speech therapists have tried many varied teaching methods to build language patterns and communication skills for these students. For many years only verbal or spoken language was the goal and the methods tended to be built on imitated or modeled spoken language. Several years ago educators began experimenting with manual signing as a technique for teaching language and also as a communication system for those students who could not learn a spoken language system. At Wilson-Pacific School in Seattle, Washington, manual signing was found to be successful with many mentally handicapped students who previously had not learned to communicate (Grinnell, Detamore, & Lippke, 1976). But there were still a number of students who were unable to learn either spoken language or manual signing. The problem usually stemmed from an inability to retain words or signs, an inability to sequence words in a meaningful order, or an echolalia of spoken or signed words to the extent of preventing successful communication. The need for an alternative method of teaching language to these students was obvious.