Abstract
In this commentary, I endorse Abbot-Smith and colleagues’ call for social conversation skills training and raise challenges to designing such efforts. One challenge is to identify a set of conversational skills that are essentially universally important insofar as what is appropriate and effective conversational behavior varies situationally and culturally. A second challenge is to identify meaningful outcomes for training and how they should be assessed. In considering these challenges, I discuss Social Problem-solving Skills Training, cultural variability in children’s conversational behavior, and governmental agencies’ standards for students’ conversational competence.
In their review article, Abbot-Smith et al. (2023) make a compelling case for the importance of conversational competence in children’s lives. Competence predicts the quality of social relationships and mental health across the lifespan, among other outcomes. These outcomes are relevant to both typically developing and atypically developing children. In this commentary, I support the authors’ call for social conversation skills training and raise several issues that should be taken into consideration in designing such efforts.
The wisdom of honing conversational skills in large, diverse populations of children is clear. The field of community psychology (see American Psychological Association, 2023; Kloos et al., 2021) offers a way to conceptualize this approach. It emphasizes wellness and competence. ‘Community’ refers both to the settings and targets of interventions.
A central tenet of community psychology is primary prevention: intervening early rather than treating subsequent behavioral, social, and psychological problems (Institute for Work and Health, 2015). That is, for example, rather than waiting to remediate or strengthen communication skills until children exhibit conversational deficits or emotional, social, or academic peer difficulties, those skills could be enhanced earlier to stave off such negative outcomes. Children would be ‘immunized’ against those outcomes.
Logical places to implement broad-based prevention programs include preschools, day care centers, and primary schools, a whole classroom approach that Abbot-Smith and colleagues advocate. One such prototypical program is the Social Problem-solving Skills Training developed by researchers at the University of Rochester, including Emory Cowen, one of the fathers of community psychology and community mental health (see, for example, Gesten et al., 1982). Replicated and extended numerous times, this program involved a series of highly structured, classroom-based lessons delivered by trained teachers and research assistants to diverse samples of primary school children over a period of months. Researchers contrasted pre- and post-intervention social problem-solving skills and adjustment of children in treatment versus control classrooms and checked whether differences maintained a year later. Although this body of work demonstrated gains in social problem-solving skills, findings for adjustment were less clear. Weissberg and Gesten (1982) argued that it was necessary to explore the developmental appropriateness of curricula and instructional methods to adequately assess the promise of their approach for improving adjustment.
Likewise, Abbot-Smith and colleagues argue that considerable research needs to be conducted to identify the specific conversational skills that matter for healthy functioning, determine whether they are trainable, and then explore subsequent outcomes for children who initially varied in level of conversational skill. These endeavors are by no means straightforward, as the authors acknowledge. Two questions strike me as particularly thorny. First, is it possible to identify a set of specific conversational skills that are essentially universally important insofar as what is appropriate and effective conversational behavior varies situationally and culturally? Second, what are meaningful outcomes for training and how should they be assessed?
With respect to skills, the authors place particular importance on topic maintenance. This ability, they note, requires topically contingent and timely responding, producing and interpreting cues indicating interest and turn opportunities, and avoiding dominating conversations. What constitutes appropriate topically contingent responding varies culturally. When telling stories, some African American children do not produce linear topic-focused narratives (Champion, 1998). Children in collectivist cultures produce different kinds of narratives than do children in individualistic cultures (Westby & Culatta, 2016). It is possible that the degree to which children monopolize conversations may also relate to whether children come from individualistic or collectivist cultures. Canadian Inuit (Muir & Bohr, 2019; Paradis et al., 2021) and American Navajo (Young, 2019) children have different conventions than do Anglo-Americans for taking conversational turns and responding to direct questions as do some native Arabic-speaking children (Shatz & Wilkinson, 2013).
Furthermore, topic maintenance is probably not sufficient for capturing all relevant predictors. The authors also identify initiating and concluding conversations as being less critical, but research shows that these conversational behaviors are associated with popularity (Samter, 2003) and are mechanisms for gaining and displaying knowledge in classrooms (Gardner, 2019). Listeners evaluate additional conversational behaviors such as forms of address, routines, polite requests (Becker, 1994; Bryant, 1999), and honorific or more informal expressions (Ahn, 2020) that also play a role in communication effectiveness and relationships with peers.
Not only are there many individual behaviors that probably contribute to conversational and social competence, there are also no hard and fast rules for what constitutes appropriateness (van der Wilt et al., 2019). Rather, the specific appropriate instantiation of a behavior such as a request varies across situations. As I have noted elsewhere (Becker, 1982, 1990), a request that on its surface seems to be highly polite and appropriate (e.g. ‘Pretty please may I have that pencil if it’s no trouble?’) might be viewed as rude and inappropriate if a preschooler directed it at a teacher.
Lest the issues I raise about conversational skills to be trained seem overly pessimistic, I offer a possible solution. A way to deal with cultural and situational variability in the plethora of specific skills is to train global, holistic conversational competence. That appears to be the approach taken by many agencies promoting educational standards.
The importance of general conversational competence is recognized in the national standards of several countries. The United Kingdom has set forth foundational learning goals that children in England should achieve by age 5 (Department for Education, United Kingdom, 2022). They include, for example, listening attentively and responding with relevant questions, comments, and actions during whole class discussions and small group interactions and holding back-and-forth conversations with teachers and peers. school years 1 to 6 (i.e., between the ages of 5 and 11), Pupils should be taught to develop their competence in spoken language and listening to enhance the effectiveness with which they are able to communicate across a range of contexts and to a range of audiences. They should therefore have opportunities to work in groups of different sizes – in pairs, small groups, large groups and as a whole class. Pupils should understand how to take turns and when and how to participate constructively in conversations and debates. (Department for Education, United Kingdom, 2014, p. 7)
Statutory requirements include teaching students to listen and respond appropriately to adults and peers, select and use appropriate registers, and maintain attention and participate actively in collaborative conversations by staying on topic and initiating and responding to comments. Several Canadian provinces outline similar expectations for primary school students (e.g. Ministry of Education, Province of British Columbia, 2017; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006), as does the Common Core State Standards Initiative (2021) used by some states in the United States.
Note that these agencies do not articulate specific ways in which conversational skills should be taught, nor do I. However, the multi-faceted approach of Social Problem-solving Skills Training (e.g. Gesten et al., 1982) is informative. Classroom training included class discussions, videotaped modeling, small group role-play (classroom, playground, home situations), workbooks, and competitive and collaborative games over the course of several months. Providing opportunities for children to participate in conversation for a variety of purposes, in different situations, and with different conversational partners appears to help children learn to communicate effectively (Clark, 2018).
As to the second question of how assessment should proceed, a holistic approach may again be most appropriate and effective. A qualitative view of competence would better account for cultural and situational variability than would a focus on the production of specific behaviors. Such is the approach advocated in the United Kingdom (Department for Education, United Kingdom, 2022, pp. 8–9). The Department of Education notes that teachers should not ‘tick off’ individual behaviors but should use their professional judgment to determine whether each learning goal in its totality best represents a child’s learning and development. Teachers may also consider input from the child, parents, and other relevant adults. This multi-informant approach should provide an accurate picture of the child’s overall embedded learning.
It is evident that these assessments may fall prey to the biases Abbot-Smith and colleagues warn against including knowledge of whether children are in training conditions. There appears to be a tension between experimental precision and validity of assessments. Toe et al. (2020) suggest reducing this tension with two complementary procedures. First, they recommend that parents (or teachers or other professionals) report on children’s functional abilities. Second, they recommend that conversations between children and familiar partners be video recorded. Those recordings could then be analyzed by unbiased, trained professionals. Together, the two procedures would provide an authentic assessment of children’s conversational skills.
Conversational competence is critical for mental health, success in school, and other important outcomes. Researchers should heed the call of Abbot-Smith and colleagues in developing broad-based programs that can enhance children’s skills and prevent deleterious outcomes. The work will be challenging but worthwhile.
