A tutorial: self-created film as a semiotic resource in AAC

Sharing personal stories with others is essential to human interaction and language development. To communicate, individuals use a variety of semiotic resources, including images, symbols, written, and spoken language. These modes are deployed in the co-construction of a face-to-face conversation. A self-created film can serve as a valuable resource to facilitate deeper understanding of a personal experience, especially where spoken or written language may present a challenge, for example, in people who rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Although the literature indicates that using videos delivers benefits for aided communicators, guidelines on how to self-create, use and transcribe them are rare. During the project “My Film, My Story”, children, teens and adults with complex communication needs developed Personal-Video-Scenes (PVSs) via the Film as Observable Communication (FaOC) method to utilize self-created films in sharing their stories. They became film/sign-makers who captured their world in images, to assist them in constructing meaning. This paper introduces the FaOC framework, including (1) a theoretical background detailing the similarities between three fields of inquiry: AAC, social semiotics, and visual anthropology (VA) and (2) a tutorial, describing the FaOC method, on how to create, use, and transcribe a PVS as a complementary multimodal resource in aided film-elicitation conversations.