Reinstating Parental Involvement in the Development of Communication Skills

Abstract

The title is deliberately paradoxical. The vast majority of parents in nearly all cultures have been, are, and will be intimately involved in developing their children's communication skills. It is they who provide children with an impetus to communicate and a milieu which is highly conducive to learning. And they are mostly successful. Their children do learn to communicate even by our most sophisticated method, language. Parents achieve this without any training, with little prior experience and in the absence of any specialist help.

Parents and Education for Severe Learning Difficulties

“…Language development is discussed in the context of a two-way interaction between adult and child by White and East (1986) who consider how modification of both the adult's and the child's language can establish a small-step teaching programme which is suitable for use by teachers or parents. An analysis of some aspects of the ways in which parents present language to handicapped children suggests that they are capable of doing an effective job and provides guidelines and content for training parents in the teaching of language (McConkey, 1979).…”

Communication and language in mental handicap 5. DON'T TEACH — INTERVENE

“…Yet it is probably not possible to teach spontaneous language production. For one thing, language production is completely under the child's control, and it is impossible to physically prompt him to speak (McConkey, 1979). Gestural prompts would be useless, and a verbal approach would be ineffective.…”

“…Bloom and Lahey (1978) argued that objects are better because they can be acted on and experienced: a similar point being made by McLean and Snyder-McLean (1978). McConkey (1979) pointed out the difficulty of representing verbs in pictures. 11.…”

Communication and language in mental handicap

“…Perhaps the greatest of these is that, whereas in spontaneous imitation the child chooses if, when, and what to imitate, in elicited imitation someone else attempts to make these decisions for him. In fact, as the child's vocal chords cannot be plucked (McConkey, 1979), the child cannot be readily prompted to imitate speech and may choose not to do so. One possible reason for the child not imitating is that the model, having been selected by someone else, may hold no interest for him.…”