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FYI Research: |
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A few months ago a seventeen-year-old girl won an honorable mention in a national poetry contest. This is a remarkable achievement, especially when you consider that three years ago this girl couldn't read. She also has cerebral palsy and doesn't speak. And the contest she entered was for young writers, period -- not young writers with disabilities. It's the kind of story Karen Erickson likes to hear. Erickson, director of Carolina's Center for Literacy and Disability Studies (CLDS), knows this young poet because she learned to read and write using Adolescent Literacy Learning Link (ALL-Link). Along with 42 other students in seven states, the student helped Erickson and collaborator David Koppenhaver, of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, complete a recent field test of their creation. ALL-Link is an Internet-based computer service that uses popular athletic culture to teach beginning reading to adolescents with moderate to severe disabilities. At least 1.4 million students in the United States fall into this category, Erickson said. "If you have severe disabilities, as many of these students do, and you don't learn to read in elementary school, you often don't get another chance," Erickson said. Many teachers don't have the time or training to give students with disabilities the individualized instruction they need to become readers. "We had to look far and wide to find student-teacher pairs willing and able to participate in our field test," Erickson said. "I think that's indicative that people don't see these children as potential literacy learners." This is where ALL-Link comes in. ALL-Link is unique because, in addition to instructing the student, it also assists the adult acting as the teacher in providing informative, real-time feedback to the student. So the learner's teacher or parent doesn't have to undergo special training but learns to teach reading as the student learns to read -- through phonics study, reading comprehension and writing instruction based on stories about athletes such as the tennis-playing Williams sisters, gymnast Dominique Moceanu or baseball player Chipper Jones. "ALL-Link is for true beginners, adolescents who are reading at a pre-first-grade level," Erickson said. While its creators especially want to serve adolescents with the most severe speech and physical disabilities such as non-speaking cerebral palsy, ALL-Link's design also meets the needs of young people with comparatively moderate impairments, including autism or Down syndrome. Erickson feels that ALL-Link's user-friendly interface, high-interest content and accessibility from any Internet-connected computer also make it a useful model for English as a Second Language (ESL) and adult literacy instruction. A grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research funded work on ALL-Link. Erickson and Koppenhaver have a development agreement with the Benetech Initiative, a Silicon Valley nonprofit whose technology projects address social challenges. Benetech will launch ALL-Link as a nonprofit subscription service and is currently developing a demonstration version, which Erickson estimates will be ready in early January 2004, under a grant from the Severns Family Foundation. More information, when available, will be posted on the CLDS web site, www.med.unc.edu/ahs/clds. "ALL-Link is a great example of what I refer to as non-traditional technology transfer, in which research generates important practical applications to help people," said Mark Crowell of Carolina's Office of Technology Development (OTD). Crowell worked with Erickson on the agreement with Benetech. "The areas of literacy training and writing skills are super-consistent with the University's mission to find tools with real-world applications." As for the teenage poet, Erickson said, "She can't speak, but she is now able to demonstrate that she has profound thoughts by expressing them through poetry." OTD is the only University office authorized to execute license agreements with companies. For more information on reporting inventions and copyrights, contact OTD at 966-3929 or visit their web site, research.unc.edu/otd. |