Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities

TABLE 4
Correlation Between Behaviors of Teachers and Students
Discussion
Teacher Behaviors
This study describes the repair behaviors used
by nonverbal students with developmental disabilities
for the communication breakdowns
occurring in their interaction with their teachers
during free play activities.
The percentage of repaired initiations
ranged from 20% to 100% with a mean of
65.57%. This is consistent with earlier research
demonstrating that students with developmental
disabilities have the ability to repair
communication in response to their teachers’
communication breakdowns (Brady et al.,
1995; Keen, 2005).
Another finding consistent with earlier
studies is that nonverbal students with developmental
disabilities use repetition the most
and recast the least as communication breakdown
strategies (Alexander et al., 1997; Calculator
& Delaney, 1986; Golinkoff, 1986).
However, Brady et al. (1995) reported more
recasts than repetitions in their sample of
nonverbal students with developmental disabilities;
which indicates a difference between
their findings and those of this study. That the
students do not have a variety of communication
behaviors in their inventories may be a
reason for repetition to be the mostly-utilized
strategy instead of recast.
The students cannot judge if their message
is understood by their teachers or not, and
this may account for the higher frequency of
repetition and no response over other strategies.
It is widely known that individuals with
developmental delays suffer from inadequacies
of speech and language skills (Scudder &
Tremain, 1992). Constrained by speech and
language problems, these individuals face dif-
Student Behaviors
No Response Repetition Recast Addition
Requesting Clarification .620 **
.629 **
No indication of Communication Breakdown .576 **
.420 *
Topic Shift .538 **
Ignoring
* p .05, ** p .01
.645 **
.636 **
ficulties in conveying, assessing, and repairing
their messages (Scudder & Tremain).
In terms of the relationships between communication
repair strategies used by the students
and the behaviors displayed by their
teachers to indicate communication breakdowns,
several moderate positive relations
were observed. For example, moderate positive
relations between requesting clarification
by teachers and recasting by the students and
between again requesting clarification by the
teachers and addition by students, and finally
once again between requesting clarification by
the teachers and repetition by the students
were found. From this, it is possible to conclude
that the use of recast, addition, and
repetition increases as the teachers require
clarification from their students.
Moderate positive relation between no indication
of communication breakdown by the
teachers and no response and repetition by
the students were also observed. So, it will not
be naive to state that no indication of communication
breakdown increases the use of both
no response and repetition.
As the teachers displayed topic shift, the
students used both recast and addition. This
leads to the interpretation that topic shift by
the teachers may cause frequent use of recast
and addition strategies by the students. Furthermore,
no relation was established between
the ignoring behavior of teachers and any of
the repair strategies. The overall interpretation
of the correlation analysis might set forth
that the teachers working with nonverbal students
who are developmentally disabled
should always indicate that the message is not
understood and there is a communication
Communication Breakdown / 407