5 essential pre-verbal skills parents and professionals need to know about for early communication

The learning of a young child’s first word is an exciting moment for both parents and professionals, and especially so for those with communication difficulties. There are many skills which precede the acquisition of language, and for those with special needs, it may take a little longer to get there. 

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It can be disheartening for parents waiting for the first words, but a little knowledge of pre-verbal skills and their importance in laying the foundations for later speech and language can help to set small learning goals and recognise progress in communication before language takes off.

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1. Eye contact is needed to maintain social interaction between two people, and communication can break down if eye contact is only fleeting . It can be encouraged through everyday interactions such as waiting for eye contact before giving children something they want, or setting up motivating activities such as blowing bubbles or peep-po games.

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2. Attention is needed to understand language and concentrate on one activity. Children with communication difficulties may have a short attention span but this can be developed through playing with the same toy in a variety of ways such as building towers with bricks, lining them up to make trains, playing peep-po games, hiding bricks, making animals or people, making shapes and patterns.

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3. Breath control is needed to control the use of breath combined with mouth movements in producing speech, and those with speech and communication difficulties may have poor control of the muscles used for speech. Breath control can be improved through blowing games such as blowing on the hair or the skin, blowing bubbles in the water or on the hair.

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4. Copying is needed to observe or imitate speech or signs, but some children with communication difficulties may be engrossed in their own world. Copying can be encouraged by playing alongside children and joining in everyday routines, as well as fun and easy activities such as copying funny faces and sounds in the mirror.

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5. Turn taking is needed for understanding of the rules of conversational turn taking. If two people talk at once, communication can break down. Games such as rolling balls and wind up toys to and fro can help encourage turn taking as well as everyday turn taking and sharing with siblings.

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Over 100 fun and practical activities to encourage pre-verbal skills and early communication can be found in the third edition of the popular resource ‘early Communication Skills’ by Charlotte Lynch and Julia Kidd.

- Charlotte Lynch 

Speechmark author early Communication Skills 3e

Importance of mental wellbeing among SEN children

Evidence shows that children and young people with SEN can be up to six times more likely than their peers to experience mental health problems.* So, just why is this? Well, firstly, all of the usual issues that can affect any child, will also affect those with SEN. Secondly, children and young people with SEN can often experience lower self-esteem than their peers, be more vulnerable to bullying, have difficulties understanding social situations and making friends, and can feel isolated from their peers, both academically and socially. 

Some may also find that they have less independence than their classmates, or can find it harder to recognise and talk about their emotions. All of these things can in turn increase the risk of mental health issues.

Mental health difficulties in young people with SEN can also often be missed or overlooked.  Sometimes it can be easy to put issues down simply to a child’s SEN (‘Oh, anxiety is just part of his dyslexia’, ‘She’s bound to feel lonely and left out because of her autism’). School staff may also feel that they lack the expertise to help a child with SEN (‘But he has ADHD so will need specialist support. I don’t know how to help him.’), or indeed that they lack the background in mental health to be able to make a difference.

So, what can we do as educators to promote mental health in children and young people with SEN?

1. Promote mental wellbeing strategies – just because a child has SEN does not mean they won’t benefit from the same strategies as others: teaching them to recognise their strengths, to cultivate positive emotions and to understand their emotions. Many will also benefit from improving their problem-solving abilities and self-esteem.
2. Ensure that you know referral procedures in your setting for specialist support for students experiencing more significant difficulties.
3. Try not to make the situation worse. Sometimes it can be easy to have a deficit-based approach to students with SEN, focusing on what they can’t do, or on closing the gap between them and their peers. It is important that we don’t eliminate the ‘fun’ and vocational aspects of the curriculum which these pupils in particular will benefit from, and that we focus on accelerating strengths and increasing enjoyment of school as these things will have a positive knock-on effect on a child’s wellbeing.

From the book: The Sky's the Limit

 - Victoria Honeybourne

Speechmark author The Sky's The Limit

*NASS (2015) Making Sense of Mental Health, online, www.nasschools.org.uk/nass/making-sense- mental-health/

A visual thesaurus can make all the difference

The idea for The Blob Visual Emotional Thesaurus came from my experiences teaching writing in the classroom. Like most teachers, the need to encourage children to edit and improve their work is an endless task. Having a pile of thesauruses in the middle of each set of desks is helpful to further enrich children's vocabulary.

This was especially true when it came to developing characters feelings -teachers who encourage children to include this in their stories usually end up getting happy or sad! When I told them to look for alternatives in the thesaurus, they would select the most unusual, because they had no idea what these words meant.

In the Visual Emotional Thesaurus, this has been overcome in two ways. Firstly, every feeling has an image to visualise how a character might feel. When trying to use words outside of their experience, that is essential. Secondly, a visual range of feelings has been developed so that children can select how intensely their character might be feeling.

This book has been developed to empower writers and to reduce the need for teachers to have to intervene during the redrafting process.

The Blobs have been used to illustrate the feelings. They have no gender, age, fashion or colour, enabling all children to read and identify with the feelings. Blobs have been used in all key stages of education, which means that confident infant readers can access these emotional words as well as older children.

- Ian Long

Speechmark illustrator of Blobs

Planning your intervention with Alex Kelly

Here are a few of my top tips for making your intervention work..

I like to put any intervention into the following four-step plan before I start my group or one-to-one sessions. This will help you to work out how best to work with someone on their social skills difficulties.

Step 1: The behaviour … what is it?

Make sure that you choose the right behaviour or skill to work on first. So, having assessed the person, you need to consider the hierarchy and the complexity of the skill you want to work on with them. Ask yourself: are you setting up the person to succeed? Is the behaviour too complex?

Now consider whether the behaviour has a function or a reason. Maybe the person is behaving in this way because of an underlying problem that has not been addressed, eg a sensory need. Or they may be getting something out of the behaviour: for example, people leave them alone and they like this.

Finally, try to really describe what the person is doing – the more detailed you can describe the behaviour, the more likely you are to be able to help the person understand what they are doing wrong. You may need to add how it might make other people feel or what they may think to give them insight, although I would do this jointly with the person.

Step 2: The rules … what are they?

We need to help people to understand what they should be doing instead – what are the rules?

What should be happening? So many adults I have worked with have asked me why they were never taught the rules as a child. Of course, before we can do that, we do need to know them ourselves, so that is where I hope the Talkabout resources will help you out!

Step 3: The motivation … what is it?

Every person you work with will need to be motivated at some level to come to your group, change their behaviour, and become more socially skilled. Often the key to success is to work out what the motivation is going to be for the person to want to change.

We cannot assume that all people are motivated by ‘being friendly’ or ‘friendly behaviour’ or ‘people will like me’ or ‘mum will be pleased’. It may be better to reward them with something: for example, an activity, a smiley-face chart or just saying ‘This is the polite thing to do’ or ‘This is the grown-up thing to do’. If we don’t consider the motivation, the intervention may fail.

Step 4: The strategy … which one is best?

There are many different ways of helping people to improve their social skills and usually the best intervention is the one that includes a number of them. There are eight main ways in which we can help someone.

1 The environment – in the school or at home. It is essential that the environment backs up what is being taught as much as possible. Think about getting all of the teaching staff on board with what you are working on. Making sure that everyone is encouraging and discouraging in the same way can go a long way to helping someone transfer those skills out of a group and into their everyday life. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t work with someone if I can’t get the environment to back us up, but it may explain a slower progress. You may see people beginning to get the behaviour in certain situations but not all of them. This is OK. It shows you that the person has the ability to get it right when the environment is conducive.

2 Talk it through with them or use comic strip conversations. With many skills and behaviours, it is very helpful to talk it through with the person or to draw it using stick figures and speech bubbles. You will gain an insight into how they may describe what is happening and why it happens, which will help with your intervention.

3 Social storyTM. Carol Gray developed this approach in the early 1990s and I often use stories to help teach social skills. A social story gives someone insight into  their difficulties and helps them to know what they can do instead. It also contains perspective sentences about what other people may be feeling or thinking which can be very useful for people with ASD.

4 A visual cue or schedule. It is important to remember that many people are helped by working visually, so the worksheets and activities in this book will help, but people may also be helped by a prompt card or a poster displayed in the classroom. At our Day Service, ‘Speaking Space’, in the UK, we use a lot of ‘now and next’ symbolised strips which can work well to cue people in to what is expected of them in certain situations.

5 A reward system. Rewards can help if the motivation is very tangible: for example, stickers to get a financial reward or do an activity, or a certificate of achievement. Other rewards can include a special time with someone to talk about something specific – for example, 20 minutes at the end of the day to talk to their mum about dinosaurs. Any reward needs to work for the person, so you need to refer to their motivation.

6 Use of other media. Using DVDs and clips of cartoons or television programmes, or even video clips of you modelling behaviour, can really help to teach social skills. Many people find visual methods of learning much easier and showing a video will usually motivate most people. I often use this method in groups as well as in one-to-one sessions. The Talkabout DVD includes video clips of actors modelling inappropriate and appropriate behaviours for all of the key skills covered in Talkabout (Kelly, 2006).

7 Role play and modelling. In this book I often suggest using role play and modelling to help teach skills. Modelling is when the facilitators model a behaviour, both inappropriate and appropriate, and role play is when the group members practise the behaviour themselves.

Here are a few important points to remember when modelling:

• Keep it short and simple.

• Model one behaviour at a time.

• Start with bad behaviour and end with good.

• Never use the group members to help you model behaviours.

• Keep the situation as ‘real’ as possible – it is better to model a normal conversation between two group facilitators than to pretend that one is a child, shopkeeper or teacher.

• Ask the group what they thought was bad about the behaviour. What should have happened?

Here are a few important points to remember when role playing:

• The group members are asked to act a scenario or to practise a skill.

• It is a stressful experience for some people.

• Try a ‘getting into role’ exercise such as the magic carpet or twisting into a role like ‘Superman’.

• Remember to de-role, especially if the group members have played the part of someone else.

• Consider using puppets.

8 Social skills group. This is my favourite way to teach social skills and the Talkabout programme should give you all the resources you need to run a successful social skills group.

The advantages of group work over one-to-one work are as follows.

• It is a more natural and comfortable environment in which to learn.

• We learn from each other.

• It is easier to problem solve, play games and to set up role plays.

• It gives the opportunity to try out new skills in a safe environment.

• There is an opportunity to transfer skills to other staff, improving the chance of carry-over into the environment.

Extract from Talkabout 2e - LOOK INSIDE

Alex Kelly 
Speechmark author of TALKABOUT

Get 20% off when you pre-order today! Hurry though this offer ends on the 30th April, enter code TA20

The Theory Behind TALKABOUT

TALKABOUT was first developed in the early 1990s when I was working as a speech and language therapist in London, UK. I was particularly interested in social skills but was frustrated by two aspects of my work as a therapist. First, there was nothing in the literature to guide me on where to start intervention following assessment; and second, my experience showed me that I was not always successful in what I was trying to teach and I could not always predict which children were going to improve and which were not. I set about to solve these two problems over a period of four years.

I started my investigations at a college of further education where I was working with 60 students who had a mild to moderate intellectual disability. We assessed all of the young people I was working with using an adapted social skills assessment from the Personal Communication Plan by Alex Hitchings and Robert Spence – now published in Kelly (2000). The students were involved in this assessment which gave us some insight into their own awareness of their difficulties. From these initial results, we grouped students into their main area of need: body language, conversational skills and assertiveness. We evaluated success through retesting on the original assessment and also compared students with poor and good awareness of their needs.

The results were fascinating. They showed that the students who had been working on their conversational skills progressed more if they had good existing non-verbal skills (ie body language), and students who had been working on their assertiveness progressed significantly more if they had good existing non-verbal and verbal skills.

In addition, we found that students who had poor self and other awareness struggled with all aspects of the work. From this, we established a hierarchy which forms the basis of the Talkabout resources.

Over the next four years, we piloted this programme using different client groups and a group of willing therapists from throughout the UK. We all found consistently that the success of intervention increased if non-verbal behaviours were taught before verbal behaviours, and if assertiveness was taught last (Kelly, 1996).

This original hierarchy then formed the basis of the first Talkabout book (Kelly, 1996) but it has been adapted over the years to include self-esteem and friendship skills. The hierarchy now looks as follows.

Using this hierarchical approach, teachers and therapists can start work with the person at a level that is appropriate to that person’s needs. They can then progress up the levels to enable the person to reach their full potential, ensuring that basic skills are taught before the more complex ones. So a student who needs work on all areas of his social skills would start work first on his body language skills and then would progress to working on his paralinguistic skills, then his conversational skills and, finally, his assertiveness skills.

If this student also had poor self-awareness and low self-esteem, he would need to work on this before working on his social skills. And if a student also had difficulties with his friendship skills, he would only work on developing these skills if he had good self-awareness and good nonverbal and verbal skills.

Of course, success is not just about what you teach first; it is also down to how you teach it.

Extract from Talkabout 2e - LOOK INSIDE

Alex Kelly 
Speechmark author of TALKABOUT

Get 20% off when you pre-order today! Hurry though this offer ends on the 30th April, enter code TA20.