About the Association Method

What is The Association Method?
The Association Method is a phonics-based, multi-sensory and multilevel curriculum designed to teach oral and written communication to people with severe communication disorders. It was developed by the late Mildred McGinnis at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St Louis over fifty years ago.

The curriculum matches the strengths and needs of each individual child and works on the core deficits of speech and language, social interaction and behavior. Instruction progresses from the teaching of individual sounds to syllables, words of gradually increasing length, basic sentences and questions, more advanced sentence structures and the corresponding questions. Ultimately, when sufficient language skills have been achieved, a transition is made to traditional textbook formats for instruction.

The teaching procedures are specifically designed to reduce or alleviate the language-disordered child?s difficulties in decoding, organizing, associating, storing and retrieving information pertinent to the production of clear, articulate speech.

The Association Method is available in a number of areas throughout North America and has a long history of bringing speech, reading and writing, to children previously rendered nonverbal and illiterate by severe speech impairments. It has been used successfully to teach children with severe apraxia to speak. It is also effective with all degrees of aphasia (language-disorders), autism, dyslexia, hearing impairment, head trauma and the regular education of elementary students and adult non-readers.

If the Association Method has been around for so long, why isn?t it better known?
The method was passed down from Ms. McGinnis to her students, who established their own schools and mentored a few colleagues. Dedicated to their schools and the children, most were unable to devote much time to promotion.* And because there is nothing to buy or sell, no one has ever had an interest in marketing the method. In fact, in all but the most advanced levels of the Method -- when students are transitioned to traditional texts -- the teachers, themselves, make nearly all of the materials. It is also worth noting that an effective Association Method program is not that easy to replicate. While the basics of the technique are relatively easy to acquire, truly effective application requires significant skill, experience and diligence.

* It must be acknowledged that Maureen Martin, Director of the Dubard School for Language Disorders in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and her predecessor, Etoile Dubard, have made it their mission to provide professional development in the Method. Thanks to their efforts the Method is more readily available in the South.

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