Help your preschool child develop age-appropriate social language skills. This book is chock-full of functional, goal-directed activities and practical "know-how" in ten key areas of social language development.
This is a systematic program of goal-directed activities for preschool children with developmental delays and older children with severe to profound pragmatic deficits. These skill areas underpin social success:
Social Referencing - eye referencing and joint attention
Reciprocity - turn-taking in play and in communication
Responding - following directions, reciprocating greetings, answering questions, and responding to comments
Initiation- gaining attention of the listener, and beginning an interaction
Topicalization - topic maintenance, initiating a topic, and shifting topics
Communicative Functions/Speech Acts - protesting, requesting, answering and asking questions, and making statements/comments
Nonverbal Signaling - eye, voice, body, and space messages
Cohesion - presupposition, eliminating redundancy, and communicative reference
ComprehensionMonitoring and Conversational Repair - inaccuracies in discourse, communication breakdowns, and conversational repair
Discourse Modalities - descriptive, narrative, persuasive, and humorous discourse
There is a hierarchy of instructional objectives and corresponding activities for each skill area. The functional activities use: