SPEECH THERAPY AND SOCIAL COMMUNICATION

As a speech therapist, one of my primary areas of focus is helping people communicate more effectively. Social communication is an essential part of effective communication. Most of us don’t even realize we are paying attention to the social factors of conversation. For most of us it is just second nature to change our volume when we are talking inside versus outside. Or to change the way we talk to adults versus children. Most of us know that people have a personal space bubble and we shouldn’t get too close when we are talking to them. We can understand emotions and facial expressions, body language and sarcasm. Most of us recognize that other people may have different thoughts or opinions than we do. We know that we have to take turns while talking and that we need to say on topic for what is being discussed. However, for people who struggle with social communication these things are very difficult and can make conversation and interaction almost impossible.

If you know a child or adolescent who is struggling with the social interaction aspects of communication, call the clinic and make an appointment for a speech therapy evaluation.

FIVE SIMPLE WAYS TO PRACTICE SOCIAL COMMUNICATION

1. RETELLING STORIES

Personal and fictional narratives are a great way to work on social communication skills. We look at the pictures in a book to identify facial expression and emotions.
We talk about what characters are feeling, why they reacted the way they did or how they solved a problem. We discuss figurative language and sarcasm. We use experiences of characters to work on topic maintenance and thinking about what someone else might think that is different from what we are thinking.

2. PLAYING GAMES

We use games to teach social skills such as: turn taking, cooperation, emotion regulation (being a good winner or good loser), following directions and playing by the rules.

3. ROLE PLAY CONVERSATION

A great way to work on social communication is to actually practice having conversations and discussing together what went well and what was difficult. If a child is having trouble making friends we would role play what we could say to a child at school to help them make a new friend.

4. SHORT VIDEOS

Kids need more visual examples to understand these abstract concepts. Short videos on Youtube or Disney shorts can be a visual way to illustrate social skills a child struggles with.

5. PRETEND PLAY

Kids who struggle with social skills also usually struggle with pretend play situations. Let’s pretend that you are a McDonald’s worker and I am going to order something from you and then pay for it. These are hard concepts for kids who struggle with experiences that are not real or concrete.

Written by

Katy Roper, MS, CCC-SLP