Preschool Social Language Therapy

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:

• everyday objects and items
• environmental prompts
• reproducible therapy materials (cards, activities, social scripts, sequenced stories, visual organizers, etc.)

Each skill area has teaching helps:

• detailed explanations of the skills
• hallmarks and red flags in development
• prerequisite skills
• teaching and troubleshooting tips