NON-SPEECH COMMUNICATION
IN CHINA PROJECT

DEAL has received funding from the Australia-China Council of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs to provide resources and training in non-speech communication to parents, teachers and therapists in Shanghai.  Our partner institution is the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where we will be working closely with Professor Sun Kexing.

In October 2007 I was invited to give a keynote address on Non-Speech Communication at the inaugral international conference on Rehabilitation of Children with Cerebral Palsy held at the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.  After the conference I was asked to visit the clinics for children with cerebral palsy held at two teaching hospitals.  It is my experiences during those visits that have led to this project, which is now being extended to include communication for children with autism.

Both the hospitals I visited had well-equipped speech therapy clinics with well-trained speech therapists, but none of the therapists had any knowledge of the communication techniques which are commonly used here to assist children who can hear but who cannot speak.  They literally had never seen even the most basic items, such as cards with YES and NO (in Chinese characters, of course) for children to point to in order to answer questions. 

The electronic communication aids I was carrying, which allowed the children to 'speak' by pressing pictures for what they wanted to say, stunned them.  They had presumed that children without any speech also lacked understanding.  To hear them answering questions and composing sentences like "Cats are tame animals.  Lions are wild animals," (in Chinese, of course) was totally unexpected. 

The first clinic I visited watched me work with only two children and then closed for the day immediately to allow the staff to talk to me about the implications of what they had seen and about ways of making or obtaining similar equipment.  The second clinic remained open late into the evening with queues of desperate parents stretching down the corridors waiting to see me. 

Following these sessions Professor Sun discussed setting up a joint project to provide non-speech communication training to therapists, therapy students and parents.  As part of the project I will make two visits to Shanghai, each of a fortnight’s duration, the first in November this year and the second in May 2009. 

I ask anybody who feels they may be able to contribute skills or experience to the project to write to me at DEAL.

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