Libby Clark

Email: eclark@csu.edu.au

I am currently based in Albury, NSW – working as a casual lecturer at Charles Sturt University. I was introduced to CA by Rod Gardner in my master’s degree at Melbourne Uni and could immediately see it’s applicability to the work I did as a speech pathologist. Supporting people with complex communication difficulties to ‘live well’ meant working with significant others and community groups as much as with the client – and CA gave me a language for thinking about what it meant to use reduced linguistic abilities in a social context.  I’ve spent the past 20 years teaching speech pathologists, at a range of universities, to think about interaction in addition to ‘speech’ and ‘language’ and I completed my PhD with Johanna Rendle-Short at ANU – using CA to explore the nature of ‘feedback’ in therapy sessions.  The work of CA analysts in the speech pathology world over the past 20 years has resulted in a much stronger appreciation of the need to build assessment and intervention strategies that account for the collaborative, contextual and multi-modal nature of interaction. But that’s not easy.

I’m currently working with a small group of researchers/TM users on some video data from the Talking Mats group in Scotland.  Talking Mats is a tool for supporting multi-modal communication about things that are important to a person who has a communication difficulty of some kind or is ‘vulnerable’ in some way in an institutional context [juvenile justice; school etc.].

Our aim to support novice users to appreciate the range of ways prosody, gaze, vocalization, verbalization work together to build a response – not simply the placement of each individual option card.  I will present some data relating to the ways children engage with the TM process and share some of the struggles I find with presenting multi-modal dimensions of interaction in my transcripts, as well as how to then analyze the complex relationships between the different meaning-making practices involved in completing a successful Talking Mat interaction.

Selected readings

Levinson Stephen C. and Holler Judith. 2014. The origin of human multi-modal communication. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B3692013030220130302 http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0302

Mackay M & Murphy J. (2017) Will anyone listen to us? What matters to young people with complex and exceptional health needs and their families during health transitions. Communication Matters Journal 31(1) 23-25

Mackay, M and Matthews, R (2020) Can Scotland Be Brave? – Incorporating UNCRC Article 12 in Practice
https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotland-brave-incorporating-uncrc-article-12-practice/