Communicative competence, cultural and linguistic diversity, and social interaction: an exploratory study of communication disability and agency in childhood

<p dir="ltr"><b>Background: </b>Children with communication disability use a different balance of communicative resources than their typical peers. For example, when the ability to talk is impacted, they may rely on gestures and facial expression or prosodic variation in vocalisations to implement communicative actions (Barnes & Possemato, 2024). Alternative and Augmentative Communication systems may also be used as a communicative resource (Beukelman, 2012). Speech pathologists’ conceptualisation of communicative support for children with communication disability is strongly influenced by Light (1989)’s prominent framework focused on communicative competence. Critics of this framework highlight its limited approach to social interaction and cultural and linguistic diversity (e.g., Grandlund et al., 1995; Teachman and Gibson, 2014; Hetzroni & Harris, 1996). Integrated within this, attitudes and beliefs informing conceptualisations of communicative resources have implications for communicative competence and its application in speech pathology practice. This project contributes to our knowledge and understanding of communicative competence by exploring how speech pathologists provide services for children with communication disability in culturally and linguistically diverse families, and examining how children with a communication disability participate at school. </p><p dir="ltr"><b>Aims and Methods</b>: This project comprises two studies. Study 1 explores speech pathologists’ perspectives on providing services to children with communication disability in Australia’s culturally and linguistically diverse community. Interviews with 23 speech pathologists are analysed with a Thematic Analysis approach. Study 2 explores children’s social interactions at school from a granular interaction perspective, including both peer and student-teacher interactions. Recordings of everyday interactions at a special education primary school (5.6 hours) are analysed using a Conversation Analysis approach. </p><p dir="ltr"><b>Findings: </b>In Study 1, four key themes relating to speech pathology services for families were identified, including ‘Expectations of speech pathology services’, ‘Pervasiveness of English’, ‘Working to address challenges’ and ‘Reflections’. Study 2 examined school participation for children with communication disability. The social action of ‘registering’ (Pillet-Shore, 2021) was pervasive in the data set and two sub-collections of this action were explored. In peer interactions, two frequent forms of response to this initiating action were identified; and in class-time the role of this action in managing classroom order. Further to this, salient patterns in school participation (e.g., interaction with AAC; language choice) are explored in three focus students using single episode analyses. Dimensions of student agency are explored and established through these analyses of social interaction. </p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions: </b>This project enhances our understanding of the culturally and linguistically diverse dimensions of communicative competence, situating it in culturally and linguistically diverse Australia and in social interaction. Elements of agency are presented as core, interactionally-realised phenomena that can be used to frame the professional construct of communicative competence. The pervasiveness of English in Australia and different valuebased ways of understanding communicative resources represent challenges to supporting communicative competence and have implications for the design of future speech pathology services.</p>