These are our notes from the session Facilitating Social Communication in Children with Language Disorders: How to Drink from a Fire Hydrant (Martin Fujiki). The main argument of the session was that language processing, social and emotional learning, and pragmatics can and should be addressed together through therapy tasks, especially through book sharing.
· “Social communication is the use of language in social contexts. It encompasses social interaction, social cognition, pragmatics, and language processing.” (ASHA Practice Portal).
Many children with developmental learning disabilities (DLD) share these social outcomes:
§ Poor friendships
§ Victimized by peers
§ Poor peer acceptance
§ Poor self-esteem
§ High levels of anxiety
§ High levels of depression
§ High levels of social withdrawal
§ High levels of problem behavior
Emotional Intelligence in Children with DLD:
§ Difficulty regulating emotions
§ Difficulty identifying emotion expressed vocally
§ Difficulty identifying emotion on faces
§ Difficulty inferring emotions that individuals feel within a particular context
§ Difficulty hiding emotions for social reasons
The second part of the session was titled Lab: Facilitating Social Communication –When Rubber Meets the Road (Martin Fujiki)
· From the Perspective of a child with DLD:
o Books are hard work
o Language is hard work
o Emotion knowledge is hard work
o Books have mostly been NO FUN!