Meath’s Total Communication Research is Published!
We – and Speech and Language UK – are celebrating the publication of Meath’s Research showing that Total Communication works to increase the communication abilities of our children.
Total Communication is the use of signing by everyone across school in all settings, along with the use of VOCAs (voice output communication aids, ie ‘talkers’) for children who need them, plus using communication boards and active learning.
Our research measured children’s ability to tell things that happened in class stories and the length of their utterances – chains of language. We measured these first following lessons without Total Communication and then we measured the same abilities after lessons that incorporated Total Communication.
The results are compelling: each child who took part in the research showed a statistically significant improvement in the communication abilities we measured when using Total Communication. As a group, these improvements when using Total Communication were so pronounced that there was less than a 1 in 1000 chance that the results occurred by chance.
The children used differing combinations of speech, signing and VOCAs to talk about the stories.
Thank you so much to the children who took part in the research, and their parents. It’s really exciting to have published Meath research evidence showing how our teachers, speech and language therapists and learning support assistants collaborate using signing, VOCAs, communication boards and active learning to enhance our children’s communication.
The research has just been published in the peer reviewed journal ‘Child Language Teaching and Therapy’. You can read the full paper here (reading the Abstract at the beginning, and the Conclusions gives a good overview):
Luckins, J., Tongue, G. and Clegg, J., 2025. Is the Total Communication approach effective for children with complex speech, language and communication needs? Child Language Teaching and Therapy, p.02656590251315598 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02656590251315598
