Cognitive

More than just IQ: can s/he learn new procedures, does s/he have the ability to understand the differences in style between spoken and written language? Students must be flexible in their thinking, able to juggle several tasks at once.

Ability to Speak

Formalistic style of talking for writing. Discrete speech is more forgiving, can correct it faster, donít have to process whole sentence.

Dialects are harder with continuous speech

Quality of Speech

Speech production: such as motor planning, articulation, voice quality, clear enunciation of each word in the sequence

Reading abilities

Grade Level at Grade 2 for word identification for accuracy monitoring. Student must distinguish between visually similar words.

Spelling abilities

Must be able to identify first two letters of a word. Continuous speech may require that the user spell the entire word. Must have sufficient phonetic spelling skills.

Language processing abilities

Self monitoring abilities

Must understand the task one is trying to do, then to evaluate oneís performance in accomplishing that task, and finally to understand how to change that performance when it does not meet task needs. Strong developmental component to these abilities.

Perseverance

Must be able to "see the big picture" and handle frustration especially in the training mode.

Investment in Writing

The decision to use SR must come from the individual who must be interested in the act of writing, and not made by others who think they know best.