[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Al;an Badmington (to Kimberly)
Date: 23 Oct 2006
Time: 12:51:44 -0500
Remote Name: 84.64.23.186
Hi Kimberly, Thank you for taking the time to read my paper and contribute to the threaded discussion. The Internet chatrooms that were attached to the major Yahoo stuttering-related Internet forums for so many years, no longer exist. However, when they were operational, they offered both text and voice facilities. As former owner/moderator of one of those forums, I regularly arranged and participated in both group and individual chats with PWS from all over the world. At least once a week, we would arrange a group chat, to which all members were invited. Thankfully, not everyone put in an appearance because (at the time) our membership exceeded 3000 ;-) The numbers who responded varied between probably 6 and 20 persons, of whom only a few elected to use their microphone and engage in voice chat. The majority preferred to exchange text messages, while also listening to the conversations of the few who were speaking aloud. I suspect that those who declined to use the voice facility lacked the confidence to speak openly in front of others, even though everyone present would have had an understanding of each other's communication difficulties. Those who chose to speak really gained in confidence. But that meant that they would speak more and more, making it more difficult for the less-fluent speakers to break into the conversation. Placing myself in the latter situation, I guess that I would have had similar feelings in the days when my speech was problematical. As moderator, I would always attempt to give everyone a fair crack of the whip, but those who were enjoying greater fluency simply wanted to talk and talk. Who could blame them? ;-) Today, the Yahoo forums have vanished but it is to my knowledge that many PWS utilise facilities such as Skype. The speech programme that I joined in 2000 has a forum dedicated to members of that programme, thus providing support and opportunities to practise their speech. I hope that this throws some light on the matter. Kindest regards Alan