Teaching kids how to have a conversation is hard.
Several years ago I decided I was ready for a change. I had spent the previous 10 years working with preschool age kids. An opportunity presented itself, so I decided to make the move to elementary age kids.
I ended up with multiple older elementary students on my new caseload who were all working on various aspects of pragmatic or social language. I didn’t know what to, so I called my friend, who was a fellow SLP and also an Assistive Technology specialist. We dug through the research and developed a color coded system for teaching a variety of kids how to have a conversation not only with adults, but also with their peers. It was truly amazing to see how my students responded to the color coded visuals I taught them!
Here are the basic steps involved in teaching kids how to engage in a conversation:
1.Explain the need for a conversation and the different parts of a conversation. There’s more to having a conversation than just answering questions or making comments.
Parts of a Conversation:
- Attention Grabber
- Answer a Question
- Add a Follow Up
- Ask a Question
- Make a Comment
- Appropriately Shift the Conversation
- Close the Conversation
2. Have your students generate a list of conversation topics. (Examples include: hobbies, pets, favorite foods, vacations, movies, tv shows, games, etc.)
For students with less advanced social conversation skills, mapping out the conversation before beginning the conversation can be incredibly helpful. When starting out, my goal is for each student to come up with one question and one comment related to the chosen topic. I often use sentence starters, core vocabulary, or answer choices to help my students generate questions and comments related to the topic.
Once they’ve mapped out a question and a comment, engaging in a short conversation with a peer or an adult is so much easier. You’ve just eliminated the part of the conversation where your student has to try to quickly generate a question or a comment while simultaneously keeping up with the pace of the conversation. They can simply refer to their conversation map.
3. Practice having conversations, with you or a familiar peer, using visuals supports to guide the conversation. It’s so important to try to limit the amount of verbal prompts you’re giving a student. I love using visuals. They’re so much easier to fade.
Things to remember when starting out:
- Provide LOTS of structure.
- Initially, students get one attention grabber card, one answer a question card, and one ask a question card.
- As they complete the task, they put the colored card in the finished basket in the middle of the table.
- If needed, write the topic of conversation on a notecard or sticky note as a reminder.
- As your students’ skills improve, you can give your students more rainbow cards to use for each topic (i.e. 5-10 cards).
- With improvement, flip the requirement, let them have a conversation with an adult or a peer. Each time they ask a question, make a comment, or answer a question, they earn the corresponding colored card.
4. Once the conversation is finished, review how your students did. At the end of the conversation, they can check to see if they had a “rainbow” conversation. Talk about the things your students did really well as well as about the areas that they could improve upon. Maybe they have too many blues or not enough red cards. This provides great visual feedback for subsequent tries.
As your students conversation skills improve, practice shifting the conversation to another topic, add in other peers, and practice having conversations in different settings. You can even turn it into a game and see how many cards they can get in each color!
Have Fun With It!
You can do it! It takes time to teach conversation skills, but your students will be engaging in conversations before you know it!
Need More?
If you try these ideas but are still looking for a super helpful resource to get your students participating in conversations, here is one of my more popular conversation resources:
