Social communication is all about how we use language and interact with other people.
This can be at home with your families, at school with your friends and teachers, and many other places in your everyday life.
There are different ways we can interact with others, and we don’t just have to use our voice and speak.
We can use different gestures, such as waving our hand to say hello, and body language, such as facing the person we are speaking to, to let others know we are engaging with them.
We call these our ‘unspoken rules’ of social communication, and we can learn them from everyone around us.
Understanding Social Communication
Social communication sets the foundation for building relationships with others.
By demonstrating appropriate social communication skills, we show other people that we are interested in them.
This helps to further develop our connections with all types of different people including our family, friends, classmates and teachers (Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework, 2016).
When these ‘unspoken rules’ are not followed, this can lead to a communication breakdown which sometimes makes some people feel confused, uncomfortable or isolated.
Speech Pathologists Can Help
If you or your child are having difficulty with these ‘unspoken rules’ of social communication, then speech pathologists can help.
We work with people who have difficulty interacting with others, engaging in conversation or noticing on different social communication cues.
Speech pathology sessions may work to target the following skills:
- Social greetings such as saying “hello” or “goodbye”
- Turn taking skills both in play and conversation
- Recognising and expressing emotions
- Learning how to interact with familiar and unfamiliar people
- Initiating and joining in play and conversations
- Maintaining interesting conversations with others
- Understanding body language, gestures and tone of voice
- Making new friends
- Higher level language skills (such as understanding inference and indirect language, sarcasm, idioms and humour)
- Repair strategies for when communication breaks down
If you have any concerns regarding your child’s social communication skills, please do not hesitate to contact Box Hill Speech Pathology on 9899 5494 to book an appointment with one of our speech pathologists.
References:
Social Communication. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Available at: https://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/Social-Communication/
Victorian early years learning and development framework (2016). Department of Education and Training Victoria. Available at: https://www.education.vic.gov.au/Documents/childhood/providers/edcare/pracguidehighexpectations2017.pdf
