IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO
by Rosemary Crossley
The importance of feedback in communication
Social interaction
Every interaction involves a feedback loop - I speak to you, you respond to (or ignore) me, I react and so on. We are acculturated to notice the reactions from our conversation partners and we adjust our interactions accordingly, even if irrationally. Have you ever lost your voice and been reduced to whispering, only to discover that everyone whispers back to you? People with severe communication impairment (SCI), especially people with impaired facial expression, may never be able to give standard feedback, and all their interactions may be skewed as a result.
If someone doesn't respond when we speak, we repeat what we said more loudly. There are three main groups of people who don't respond to ordinary speech - foreigners, the hard of hearing, and babies - and the adaptations we make for them may be applied to anyone who doesn't answer us, with the result that university graduates who can't speak may find themselves addressed in slow, loud, babytalk.
A model of human communication
A simple model of communication incorporates mathematician Claude Shannon's work on noise (or interference) and Norbert Weiner's work on feedback. A message is originated by a sender. The message is dispatched through a communication channel. In the process of transmission a variable amount of noise is overlaid on the signal. The task of the person receiving the communication is to first separate the signal from the noise and then to decode the message, providing sufficient feedback to the sender to permit the message to be repaired if it has been distorted or misunderstood.
Communication effectiveness
The more difficult communication is, the more important partner feedback is. Rachel, whose speech is very unclear, likes to talk on the phone.
To do so successfully she relies on her listener to echo each word she says. If the echo is incorrect she repeats the word until it is echoed correctly, or spells it aloud, with each letter being echoed.
Obviously such an interaction can only succeed if the listener has the necessary skills and perseverance. The whole system depends on feedback - speak, repeat, confirm. Rachel and her listener must have similar levels of literacy, and the listener has to know Rachel's clarification strategies. Most importantly, both parties have to be highly motivated and prepared to expend considerable time and energy to enable communication to take place.
Similar feedback is needed when people are using communication boards. As a communication board produces no printed or spoken output, board users have no way of knowing how their messages are being received unless their partners tell them. Many communication breakdowns occur because listeners do not provide users with the on-going feedback which would enable misunderstandings to be corrected immediately (presuming each board user had a way of making corrections). The more selections (letters or symbols) involved in creating the message the more important continuous feedback is - imagine getting to the end of spelling a long sentence, containing several hundred letters, and discovering that your partner had misread something at the start. How do you correct the misunderstanding without spelling the whole message again?
Another reason for repeating the message as it's created is that it keeps it fresh in the minds of sender and receiver. A message which is created slowly, over a period of minutes, places unusual demands on the memories of both parties. Speakers may forget what they're saying in a sentence taking no more than a few seconds. Imagine keeping track for the 5 or 10 minutes some people take to spell a sentence. Recapitulating the message at the end of each word takes some of the memory burden off the sender and ensures that the listener hasn't forgotten the start of the sentence before the end is reached.
Feedback and facilitation
At a conference a woman brought up her son to talk to me. She held his hand over a card containing the letters of the alphabet but no DELETE or NO. The boy's eyes were on the ceiling while his hand moved around the board. After a few minutes silence his mother said "He spelt 'I want to thank you for discovering FC. I use it all the time.' " Judging by appearances I wasn't sure he'd ever used it - used it that is, to communicate his own thoughts. This kind of facilitation creates understandable skepticism.
If the boy did have spelling skills several things still needed to change for him to have a chance of getting his own message through :
1. The boy needed to look at the board to ensure he was hitting the letters he intended.
2. His mother needed to say each letter he indicated, and say words as they were completed.
3. The communication board needed to include correction and feedback strategies such as DELETE, OOPS!, YES and NO, THAT'S RIGHT, THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT, JOKE, GOOD ONE, EXCUSE ME and IT'S NOT IMPORTANT.
4. The boy needed to have been taught the strategies needed to correct errors and given the confidence to correct his partners if they miscalled letters or words
5. The mother needed to check the complete message with her son to ensure she'd got it right before passing it on.
In fact, if the last 4 precautions had been in place it wouldn't have been essential for the boy to look at the board, providing he really did want to produce a message, had some idea of the board layout, and was prepared to spend a lot of time correcting mistakes.
People who have poor eyesight or self-monitoring are especially vulnerable in the absence of feedback, and they may need their partners to echo each selection even if they are using aids with print output.
Good feedback combined with a reliable error correction strategy can enable successful communication to take place despite what would otherwise be overriding problems. Sometimes the feedback can be provided by the voice of a communication aid rather than a human partner.
Tara, a non-speaker with cerebral palsy who is blind and who has not had much formal education, does spell effectively with facilitation. The aid she uses has a grid over the keyboard with tactile cues at the start of each row. Each item (letter, phoneme or word) that Tara selects is said aloud, and when she's spelling and she hits the space key the items selected since the last space are pronounced as a word. Tara corrects anything that doesn't sound right using a large easily-located DELETE key. She's learnt which letters and phonemes produce which sounds, and she combines them to create speech, as opposed to creating written messages.
Feedback in tests
Feedback is sometimes deliberately excluded in test situations and communication partners are prohibited from repeating letters or words aloud as they are selected. Occasionally there are pragmatic reasons for excluding oral feedback, in that it will disturb or give assistance to other students doing the same test, but generally the exclusion seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the role of feedback in message creation. Perhaps those of us who can speak are so used to silence being an integral part of the testing process that we impose it automatically, or we equate any speaking during a test with cheating. It is important that people whose communication effectiveness depends on feedback have this recognized when test protocols are established, and that appropriate accommodations are arranged.
Reprinted with permission from the DEAL Newsletter, March
1996.
The purpose of Facilitated Communication In Maine is to promote the appropriate use of facilitated communication through education, technical assistance, and support to people with disabilities, parents, educators, speech and language pathologists support providers, and other interested individuals. The project provides up-to-date information on current best practices, introductory and advanced workshops on the technique, resources regarding theoretical and practical components of facilitated communication and ongoing support to a network of resource persons who provide local education and support to other facilitators.
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