The nonverbal component of clinical lessons

Abstract

Descriptive studies of clinician-child therapy interaction suggest a tightly controlled system of verbal exchange centring around the underlying plan of the clinical lesson. Drawing upon examples from therapy lessons, this paper describes the nonverbal component of clinician-client interaction. Nonverbals are associated features of situational context, lesson organization, and remedial sequences; they emphasize, parallel, or replace verbal and nonverbal elements. The clinician uses a wide variety of body mechanisms (e.g. head, face, hands, voice) to support her efforts to facilitate child responses and manage social behaviour. A full understanding of lesson discourse must include observations of nonverbal communication.

Task-setting at home and in speech and language therapy

“…However, studies that disagree with the idea of seeing therapy speech as a special register of mothers have also been proposed (Sheng et al, 2003). Furthermore, and despite their importance, only a few studies have focused on the multimodality of interaction like using non-verbals such as body movements, gestures, gaze and facial expressions (Panagos et al, 1986b;Ochs et al, 2005). Prominent, recipient-designed practices of talk and interaction have also been described, for example, in teacher talk and interaction (e.g.…”