Reading or Decoding, It’s Learning : Symbols Help Handicapped Kids Survive in Real World

Fifteen-year-old Josh Trax pilots his electric wheelchair up and down a shopping mall in search of a store that sells the kind of wallet he favors, the ones that fasten with Velcro flaps.

Disabled by cerebral palsy, Josh is unable to speak, spell or read. But that doesn’t prevent him from communicating freely with sales clerks at three stores before buying a $2 wallet at Sweats and Surf.

Josh’s link with the rest of the world is a soft-covered blue binder full of color-coded symbols that allow him to order food, seek directions and aid, and make purchases on his weekly trips to Plaza El Camino Real with other students and teachers from the Santa Fe-California School in Vista. He has memorized scores of tiny pictures depicting different places, questions, feelings, objects and verbs that comprise an efficient pidgin language for someone without the power of speech.

“My name is Josh Trax. This is my communication book,” it says on the cover of the binder stowed in a satchel behind Josh’s wheelchair. “I can communicate with you by pointing to whatever I want to say in this book. Please help me by turning the pages if I have trouble.”

Nearby, the same system is in use by some preschoolers at the Palomar College Child Development Center in San Marcos. Too young to read, some are nevertheless deciphering and composing children’s stories with the 200 symbols at their command.

Adapting the System for Youngsters

The link between these two very different worlds is a Palomar College educator named Jane Mills, who came up with the idea of adapting the symbol system used by disabled people for the enrichment of young children.

The idea has developed into a set of six children’s stories of increasing complexity containing words and symbols. Mills and partner Larry Johnson, a free-lance writer, are marketing the Read-a-Bol stories to families and schools for both disabled and preschool children.

Featuring the adventures of a youngster named Arnie, the tales have sold about 300 three-book sets since they were published last July. Five more books featuring Arnie’s female counterpart, Abby, are being written.

“So often, the atypical kids have to try to fit in the typical world,” Mills said. “Here, we took something

that worked for them and said, ‘Here, typical world, here’s something that can work for you.’ ”

Having taught in elementary schools and served as a consultant to United Cerebral Palsy Assn. of San Diego County in Escondido, Mills realized the similarities in the language used by the two groups about three years ago. To test her idea, she pasted small pictures over words in her 3-year-old son’s books and read the stories to him.

“He was matching up his visual skills with his auditory skills and learning much more quickly how to read those books,” she said.

She then introduced the idea in the preschool at Palomar College with a handful of children selected by teacher Ronna Mahan.

They also took to the idea, first learning the symbols for various words from flashcards, then stringing the pictures into sentences and stories. Some children have begun to “write” their own stories, dictating the plots to teachers who write them down and paste symbols over the words.

“We have taken a typical kind of child’s story and made it accessible to them,” Mills said.

Practicing Skill That Parallels Reading

In the strictest sense of the word, the children are not actually reading but developing a skill that parallels reading, Mills said. They are, however, practicing many of the skills that will be needed when they are ready to read printed words.

They are learning to decode the symbols, which is the essence of reading, and practice left-to-right sequencing, another part of the skill, she said. Memorization is also enhanced.

“I don’t expect that, at the end of this, the children will read these words,” she said. “I expect that at the end of this, they have had an experience that parallels reading, that readies them for the reading tasks that will be expected of them down the road.”

They are also developing the confidence, at an early age, that reading is a skill easily mastered. Suggest reading to a preschool child and the typical response is “I can’t read,” Mills said. But present him with a series of pictures he already understands, and the task becomes much more manageable.

“After 10 minutes, they’re decoding,” she said. “That’s what reading is, decoding.”

Rebuses, which are somewhat similar to Mills’ concept, have been used successfully in children’s books for about 150 years, said Dorothy Hewes, professor of child development at San Diego State University. Though she has not seen Mills’ stories, Hewes said the idea sounds like one that could help build children’s confidence in their ability to read.

But Hewes said that preschool children are a little young to be worrying about left-to-right sequencing, and can learn decoding skills from regular picture books.

About two-thirds of each page in Mills’ Arnie stories is devoted to illustrations of the story’s plot. Beneath the pictures are the symbols, and above each symbol is the printed word.

Nouns are fairly obvious. The word “ball” is represented by a picture of a ball; “bat” looks like a bat. Verbs require more creativity. “Think” is shown by a hand pointing to the top of a head. “Says” is represented by a profile with an empty cartoonist’s balloon. For “asks,” the balloon has a question mark in it.

Other symbols are a matter of convention. “The” is represented by a triangle, “it” by an index finger pointing to a small dot. “In” is shown by the dot located inside a square, “his” by a stick figure between parentheses.

Mills is careful not to call this a language, preferring “symbol system” instead. It is culled from a variety of sources for disabled people and some sign language for the deaf. Mills invented a few of the symbols herself.

Josh’s Lifeline to the Outside World

For people like Josh, the symbols are a lifeline to the outside world. His search for the wallet represented the first time he was able to go off on his own and make contact with salespeople. Despite a little trouble encouraging clerks to pull the communication book from its satchel, everything went smoothly with three attempts in three different stores. Later, he and other students sat alone and ordered lunch by pointing to menus they have memorized.

“You’re witnessing a step in Josh’s advancement,” said Chuck Charter, Josh’s teacher. “We’ve gone to food places and he’s ordered, and he’s communicated things to us in class. But this is really the first time he’s ever gone on his own through the aisles with a stranger.”

The strangers were a little confused, but very helpful.

“I knew to come around and ask,” said sales clerk Carrie Roberts at Sweats and Surf. “When he pointed to the side of his chair (where the location of the communication book is printed on a piece of paper), I thought he was going to push a button.”

Besides fostering students’ independence and sophistication, these weekly visits to the shopping mall keep teachers in touch with the needs of their students. On a recent trip, another student, Tonnette Ford, needed to buy a book bag, but her communication book did not contain any applicable symbol. One had to be drawn and added to the collection.

“That’s why coming out in the community is so important,” Charter said. “You come here and it teaches you what you need.”

Most importantly, the symbol system is a way for people like Josh to interact with others and express emotions, mundane aspects of daily life that the rest of us take for granted.

“When nothing in your body works very well, some control over your existence is very, very important,” Mills added. “He’s touched three people today who probably never got that close to a disabled person in their lives, never mind communicating with them.”