Let’s be real- it is not easy teaching social-pragmatic skills to adolescents. Not only did most of us not have any courses on this area in graduate school but materials and assessments for social language are still quite scarce. What is out there is often for younger kids or too oversimplified to be of much use for our middle and high school students with complex social-pragmatic difficulties.
Conversation skills are particularly challenging. We tend to teach students to take perfect turns, but this isn’t truly how conversations work. Many times one partner will say a few more sentences or a few less. Sometimes one person is telling a story and requires a lengthy turn or several turns, especially if he/she is getting cues the other person is interested in what they are saying. In fact, even the rule of giving 1-3 sentence verbal responses isn’t really an accurate representation of how conversation goes; people may tell stories that require many more sentences, getting responses of acknowledgement or affirmation that are only a word or nod, or be attending to a group conversation where various people take the lead with stories, opinions, or interesting facts while others chime in with comments and questions.
So how do we teach conversation skills? Here are some strategies and lesson ideas:
Self-Rating Pragmatic Skills
We need to talk to our students about their strengths and weaknesses. I personally have had students complete a self-rating of their social skills like this one. We discuss what each question means. Then, we write down 3 strengths and 3 areas the student could improve upon. It’s important to discuss strengths so social skills doesn’t feel like a constant critique of the student’s social weaknesses. Many students are sensitive about their social interactions and peer relationships, so you want to listen well and be careful how you phrase negative feedback.
Dynamic Social Skills Assessment
Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking Dynamic Assessment Protocol is a great tool for this. It goes beyond pragmatics checklists and actually gives the student opportunities to demonstrate skills like social inferencing from pictures, body language, perspective-taking, and narrative organization skills. Supplementing any formal or dynamic assessment with your own measures is also important. For instance, I pull up my own real life photos of social situations that are age-appropriate and ask what the student thinks is happening in each picture and what the people in it are thinking.
Our students on the spectrum or with pragmatic language issues often have idiosyncratic, quirky ways of speaking. Personally, it’s rare I found a TPT or other pre-made product that perfectly addresses the issues I see with a student’s narratives. Hence, I try to make example narrative that imitate the student’s narrative style and quirks. The student reads the narrative, and I ask them questions designed to raise their self-awareness and practice of narrative skills. Here are some example narratives I’ve written. I then ask follow-up questions and typically ask the student to “fix” the narrative in some way (for example, making it more concise or more on-topic).
We can’t expect our students to be perfect with social skills all the time; even our students without social language difficulties make social blunders. Thus, it’s important to practice repairing a conversation or, for that matter, a relationship. Have the student practice what they could say if they went on too long with their story and bored the listener. Have him/her practice what to say if they forgot to ask follow-up questions about something a peer shared. Have the student practice how to repair an interaction when something they say came off too harsh or blunt (sometimes the comment really *is* a bit rude, and other times our students struggle with using a tone or style that conveys their actual feelings). For most of these situation, I do role-playing with the students. They get a laugh out of the “acting” and pretending I am a “peer”. It also keeps the atmosphere light and therefore prevents the student from feeling defensive about their social skills
Teen-Friendly Social Skills Videos
So much of what’s out there for teaching social skills seems to be for younger students. I would highly recommend using tv, movie clips, and even youtube videos to evaluate social interactions and discuss what’s going on with your teen and tween clients. I also love these social skills videos from PEERS and Video Learning Squad (the latter is not free, but you can test it out with a free month trial).
Teaching social-pragmatic language skills takes a lot of creativity and initiative, but hopefully these resources and ideas will give you a good starting point!