Teaching Conversation Skills-Older Students

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Are you working on conversation skills with your middle or high school students?

Looking for ideas for working on conversation skills in your speech therapy sessions?

The main conversation skills I cover in this post are:

Questions and comments to maintain the conversation,
Staying on topic, and
Conversation reciprocity, or what to do about one-sided conversations!

You might find these other blog posts on conversation skills helpful:

Starting and joining a conversation

Having meaningful conversations

conversation skills, activiies, pragmatics, middle school, older students, speech therapy, social skills

Conversation Skills: Dialogue versus Monologue

Our older students in speech therapy may benefit from something more than just a definition of what a “conversation” entails. For students who tend to have one-sided conversations, I like to start off by contrasting “dialogues” and “monologues.” Good vocabulary targets for older students in speech therapy.

Introduce the vocabulary of “dialogue” versus “monologue.” Dialogues in conversations are defined as a conversation between 2 or more people. When our students talk to peers, they interact and engage in dialogue. Monologues are generally described as one person doing all the talking, or one-sided conversations. There is typically no social interaction during a monologue. Monologues are found in acting and stage productions. A monologue style of communication can also be used by teachers and professors but is not typical in peer communications. There are times when students that monopolize conversations often sound like they are engaged in a monologue, rather than a social interaction so it can be helpful to contrast the two styles of communication.

Use the youtube video One Minute Monologues and watch the first one. Stop the video at 1:28 when the first monologue is over. Then, watch a short portion of this youtube video “pauses in conversation, 3:21, to show an example of a dialogue in conversation. Have students generate of list of how a dialogue, “a conversation between 2 or more people” is different from the monologue in the video or use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast.

Conversation Skills: Conversation Chaos Script

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Use teaching pages from the “let’s talk about conversations” packet and discuss how listeners feel when one person monopolizes a conversation. In this same packet, there is a script called “conversation chaos” which portrays a one-sided conversation. Project the script that features it on your laptop or smart board and analyze it as a group. There is a worksheet in the packet to guide the analysis. Then, you can “fix” the conversation as a group and roleplay the fixed conversation.

If you find conversation scripts to be an effective teaching tool, you might want to check out this no prep packet, conversation scripts.

Conversation Skills: Questions and Comments

Introduce the vocabulary of either “maintain/end” or “cultivate/destroy” depending upon your student’s vocabulary skills.

We will use the latter in our discussion.

There are two top contenders for how we maintain a conversation: questions and comments. Without them, conversations fall flat and quickly come to an end! In the teaching story of the packet, “let’s talk about conversations,” you can discuss “rule 3, cultivate the conversation,” with your students. Questions and comments “cultivate” the conversation, while interrupting and making huge topic changes can “destroy” a conversation. Questions help us get to know other people and forge new friendships while silly noises and only talking about your own interests does little to help students make friends and form relationships.

Try making a list of conversation cultivators and destroyers with your group! Or, play a charades game where you model a cultivator or a destroyer and others guess which it is!

Compliments are also a great way to contribute to and maintain conversations.

You can find my blog post on compliments here.

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In this same packet, there is a “conversation game.” Students pick topics and are assigned to roleplay a “cultivator” skill or a “destroyer.” Keep these assigned cultivators and destroyers secret from the rest of the group. Choose these roles based on the needs of your students. Do you have a student that always interrupts others? Pair them to be the recipient of this interrupting behavior during a social skills group. After the students roleplay the conversation, have the rest of your group guess what “cultivator” or “destroyer” the students were roleplaying.

Teaching Conversation Skills – Staying on Topic!

Reciprocal conversations are more enjoyable if everyone stays on topic. Review “rule four, staying on topic” from the teaching story in the “let’s talk about conversations packet. If your student isn’t sure what is and isn’t considered on and off topic, or doesn’t understand why it’s an issue, try this set of BOOM cards with them first.

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Sometimes, our speech therapy students can’t maintain conversations because they aren’t interested in the topic. Do you have students in your group that struggle with acting interested while discussing non-preferred topics? View this video, “the social fake,” on you tube from Michael Peloquin and use the worksheets in the let’s talk about conversations packet to analyze the concept of telling a polite lie, also known as the social fake.

Discuss acceptable ways of changing a topic, such as waiting for a brief pause in the conversation or using a transition statement. Practice making topic changes in role played conversations. Assign your speech therapy students a topic and have them take turns making an acceptable topic change. You could also use visual tallies and tally up how many on topic questions or comments are used by each student during a conversation.

Do you have social skills students that need additional practice in their conversation skills and benefit from visual tallies? You might like this no print, interactive pdf, “cultivate the conversation.” This works well if you are a teletherapist!