Teaching Communication Strategies to Students with Communication Disabilities
Many communication scholars and researchers agree that students with oral communication disabilities should be trained to be effective communicators. Effective communication strategies need to be taught to those students to improve their communication skills. They further agree that if students are not taught effective communication strategies, they will rely on the strategies that do not work well, such as borrowing from language and avoidance strategies. Therefore, the author developed a way for teaching communication strategies to students with oral communication disabilities. The challenge of actively involving students with communication disorders in the formal education systems prompted this desktop study on some of the challenges and problems associated with students with communication disorders in the classroom. This paper examines the relationship between communication disorders and learning from a very basic and simplified perspective. The intention is not to get deep into the jargon of disability studies but to assist teachers in understanding students with communication disorders so that they also actively engage them in their teaching approaches. As such, the paper does not claim to be a professional and expert point of reference. It is derived from and built on a simple desktop literature study and document analysis. The paper's thrust is to ensure that students with communication disorders are fully and actively involved in their classroom learning activities. It says that teaching and learning are two sides of the same coin. We thus conclude that when people talk about teachers’ effectiveness, they are talking about actual student learning.