TABLET-BASED AAC IN A KAZAKHSTANI SPECIAL SCHOOL: IMPLEMENTATION, PRACTITIONER WORKLOAD AND INDIVIDUAL RESPONSE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37943/AVFP6158Keywords:
non-verbal children, augmentative and alternative communication, AAC, Proloquo2Go, LetMe Talk, implementation, Kazakh-Russian bilingual classroom, symbol acquisition, special education, Kazakhstan.Abstract
Non-verbal children in Kazakhstani special schools communicate mainly through paper picture cards and gestures. This study followed twelve children aged 6 to 10 with autism spectrum disorder or severe developmental language impairment at Special School No. 3 in Karaganda through the 2024-2025 academic year. Six worked with Proloquo2Go or LetMe Talk on tablets; six continued with cards and gestures. Allocation was not randomised. Three measures were taken: video-coded spontaneous initiation at three points, a symbol test covering taught and untaught items, and the Vineland-3 Communication Domain, completed separately by teachers and parents.
The tablet group moved further on every measure and none of the differences reached significance, which six children per condition cannot deliver for effects of this size. Endpoint initiation averaged 7.4 per fifteen-minute window against 5.1. On untaught symbols the groups scored 42 and 26 per cent, the latter indistinguishable from guessing. Vineland change was 5.2 by teacher rating and 7.8 by parent rating in the tablet group, against 2.9 and 3.7 in the card group. Neither application speaks Kazakh, so every session ran with the device in Russian and the practitioner voicing the child's home language alongside it. This has nothing to do with which method won and everything to do with what deployment here actually involves. The six tablet children also ended the year further from one another than the group averages were from each other. Configuration cost about sixty practitioner hours, mostly in the first two months. For a school weighing this up, the useful question is which children respond, and these data cannot answer it.
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