Introducing Conversational Skills

The aim of this work is to enable the children to develop their conversational skills. 

Conversational skills are more complicated to teach than non verbal skills, such as body language and paralinguistic skills, and it is important to remember that this work will need to build on existing non verbal skills.

If you are unsure whether your child can cope with this work, then go back to your assessment and check that they have good or adequate non verbal skills to enable them to succeed with this more complicated work (see issue 4). 

Conversational skills can be broken down into 4 main components and this summary is taken from Talkabout for Teenagers (due 2009).

	Starting a conversation Mostly we start a conversation in one of 5 ways: asking a question, requesting something, commenting on something in the environment, giving a general greeting e.g. ‘hello’, or making a personal remark.
	Listening Listening is an important part of any conversation and we especially need to remember to use our body language to show we are listening!
	Taking turns We need to take turns in a conversation by asking questions, answering questions, and making relevant comments.
	Finishing a conversation We need to finish the conversation by remembering to give ‘exit cues’ with our body language, and then taking control of the conversation by waiting for a pause and then saying something appropriate.

Here are a few activities that you can do to help to introduce the topic of develop conversational skills:

Modelling inappropriate and appropriate conversational skills through media

I often introduce this topic by using Scenario 23 of the Talkabout DVD which has 2 clips demonstrating conversational skills. In the first one, Tom and Christine are having a conversation at a party and they demonstrate poor skills in starting the conversation, asking and answering questions, taking turns, listening, relevance and ending the conversation.  In the second scenario they demonstrate good conversational skills.

Ask the children to see how many things they notice that were bad about the conversation, and then what was good. 

If you don’t have this DVD, maybe you could use other clips of media: ‘Fawlty Towers’ with John Cleese provides lots of good material and the Muddles and Crystals DVD has some conversational skill sections (see last week).

Modelling inappropriate and appropriate conversational skills through role play

If you are unable to use video clips, then you can model inappropriate and appropriate conversational skills yourself with a co-facilitator. 

Remember there are a few important things to keep in mind about modelling the skills yourself:

RULES for modelling

• Keep it simple – try to only show one inappropriate skill and try to keep everything else appropriate. This is easier said than done and will probably take some practise!
     
• Keep the role play in the here and now – you and your co-facilitator talking about something quite mundane, for example what you did yesterday or at the weekend.
  
  
• Don’t pretend to be anyone you’re not, for example a child or shop assistant.  This will distract the children and stop them from noticing what you are trying to demonstrate.
  
  
• Don’t pretend to be anywhere you are not, for example a restaurant or bus stop – again this will be a distraction.
  
  
• Always start with the inappropriate role play and then end with the appropriate. This is so that the children have the appropriate one in their mind.
  
  
• You need 2 facilitators to demonstrate skills through modelling.  If this is not possible, you could try using puppets for some skills.
  
  
• Don’t ever get one of the children to help you with the role play.  They are there to watch and learn.  They will also be unpredictable in their response.
  
  
• Don’t get them to practise the inappropriate skill. This may be confusing and you should always reinforce the fact that they need to practise the appropriate skill.

A conversation comic strip

You could use a comic strip of a conversation to highlight the different conversational skills (see example below, taken from Talkabout for Teenagers, due 2009) and ask the children to identify what is happening in the conversation. 

Once the main aspects of conversational skills have been identified, then the different aspects can be taught and practised.  We discussed listening in the last issue, but you may also need to teach starting and finishing a conversation, taking turns, asking and answering questions and being relevant.

So hopefully that has given you a few ideas on how you could tackle introducing the topic of conversational skills. 

In the next issue, we will continue to think about this area and look at one of the other skills in more detail.

Alex Kelly
Speech & language therapist and social skills consultant www.alexkelly.biz

Alex Kelly is the author of Speechmark's best selling Talkabout series.

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See the Talkabout online assessment tool at www.alexkelly.biz

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