Co-Construct

Conversation is co-constructed and addressing barriers often involves helping communication partners (like family members or healthcare professionals) to use different communication strategies. These communication access strategies are the communicative equivalent of a ramp for wheelchair users to access a building, in that the access is achieved by addressing the barriers to inclusion, rather than aiming to ‘fix’ the impairment.  Despite their seeming simplicity, we don’t know how or why each of the communication access strategies works in conversation; we don’t know if the strategies work in the same ways for people with different communication needs; and we don’t know how the strategieswork across different languages. Addressing these challenges requires radical change in how pragmatic theory (the theory of how communicators use language and achieve meaning in context) is used to understand communication disabilities. This radical shift will pave the way for a unified theory of communication access and a programme of inclusive communication strategies that will work across different languages, for people with different communication needs, living in contexts with different levels of resources.