Conversation Basics and Beyond – Functional Activities for ASD

This workbook provides activities designed to develop and improve essential conversation skills, such as taking turns, introducing topics and ideas, asking questions, and making comments. These activities include sentence completion, turn-starter cues, question prompts, matching, multiple choice, conversation scripts, conversation maps, and blank templates. This book also provides lists of topics, situations, and intents.

Options for use with individuals or groups include reproducible activities to:

• Model functional conversation turn-taking
• Role-play conversation scenarios and then create custom conversations using the ready-made outlines
• Teach new social expressions, feelings, and idioms
• Practice spoken conversation in therapy sessions
• Send home with students for follow-up practice with family or friends
• Give students as written assignments
• Provide a foundation for helping advanced students use their conversation skills in everyday situations such as email, text messaging, or social media posts
• Stimulate ideas and listener perspective when leading socialization, self-advocacy, and counseling groups
• Expand reasoning, imagination, and critical thinking, using some of the more advanced activities to challenge higher-functioning learners

The material in Conversation Basics and Beyond is also appropriate for use with individuals with adult-onset aphasia or cognitive impairments, young adults with emotional disorders, at-risk teens, and English Language Learners (ELL).