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
Comprehension Monitoring 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: