The Essential Skills for Successful Conversations

What is conversation? – a form of interactive, spontaneous communication between two or more people. The development of conversational skills and etiquette is an important part of socialization.

What are discourse skills?

Components of a Conversation (describe in the order that they typically happen)

• Greetings/initiation- saying hello, hey, or hi

• Introduction of topic– what do you want to talk about, can be a question, things you like (ex. what are you doing today, I like cake, I saw the new Xmen movie)

• Reading body language- non verbal cues the communication partner gives to indicate interest, boredom, anger ect. Cues that lets the speaker know if they are saying something wrong, or are losing the interest of the partner

• Maintaining conversational topic- a lot of our kiddos either perseverate on a certain topic (trucks, pokemon) and will ignore the topics that their communication partner brings up and will only talk about their desired topic

• Turn-taking- allowing their communication partner to participate and participating themselves by either asking questions, or making comments

• Asking for clarification- If they don’t understand something mentioned in the conversation

• Conversational overtures and repair- Responding to questions or comments and keeping those questions and comments related to the topic

Essential conversational skills

• Essential Skill for Successful Conversations # 1: Eye contact- Can be dependent on cultural values, so those must be taken into consideration. Many of our kiddos need consistent reminders of “look at me” during a conversation before they slowly begin to maintain eye contact for longer periods of time.

• Essential Skill for Successful Conversations # 2: Turn taking- Need to monitor so that no one person is talking for the majority of the conversation. Conversation needs to go back and forth (can incorporate visuals, token boards, and conversational board)

• Essential Skill for Successful Conversations # 3: Body language-body turned toward communication partner, being able to read body language. What typically developing children learn naturally, we have to teach specific skills to our kiddos at the clinic. Modeling looking bored, or mad, or annoyed to show them what

• Essential Skill for Successful Conversations # 4: Tone of voice-no monotone voice, does the voice have the right inflection to indicate questions, showing interest ect. , model and practice

• Essential Skill for Successful Conversations # 5: Facial expressions- understanding, model and practice