Abstract
The focus of classroom instructional time continues to be debated among educators, policy makers, academics and health professionals such as speech-language therapists. In this commentary, we emphasise the importance of reserving precious instructional time for developing children’s biologically secondary skills such as reading, writing and spelling. We argue that maintaining a focus on these core curriculum areas is critical. We advise against committing Tier 1 classroom time to conversational skills at the current time, due to the paucity of research evidence to support this. We propose an alternative model for including conversational skills in classroom practice, through the application of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, and in particular, Response to Intervention.
In their article ‘Topic maintenance in social conversation: what children need to learn and evidence this can be taught’, Abbot-Smith et al. (2023) undertake an ambitious review of the typical development of conversational discourse skills and factors that can both support and interfere with this process. It is appropriate that the authors place considerable emphasis on developmental stages, executive functioning and mentalising (Theory of Mind) to describe the complexity and variability in what has been described as a ‘biologically primary’ skill (Geary, 2008) – that is, one that humans have an evolutionary advantage for developing, and in most cases, do not need to be ‘taught’. We will re-visit this construct below, as the basis for our commentary on the article. Abbot-Smith et al. summarise the findings of their review as four key observations (pp. 630–631) that span the importance of conversational proficiency in forming and maintaining friendships, the high degree of variability among typically developing children with respect to the emergence of conversational proficiency, the fact that conversational skills cannot be reduced to simple formulae to be applied across a range of complex and subtly different contexts and the malleability of children’s conversational skills, even in the context of neurodevelopmental disorders.
These four observations entail significant challenges, tensions and potential opportunities for education systems. Children typically spend more of their waking hours on weekdays at school, in the company of peers and teachers, than they do in the company of parents and other home-based carers. The ongoing development of oral language skills (particularly at a discourse level) is critical across the school years (Snow, 2020), so it is tempting to conclude that school is a logical setting for explicit teaching of conversational skills. In this commentary, we will focus on the work of evolutionary psychologist David Geary, to argue that in the main, at the current time, the teaching of conversational discourse skills should not be a fundamental purpose of mainstream schooling. We note that this does not mean that schools are not settings where these skills can be enhanced. Our questions, however, pertain to the extent to which this can reasonably be a core purpose of school at the current time, given (a) the fragile state of the evidence to support Tier 1 conversational skills training and (b) what we see as the more urgent imperative in most English-speaking countries to improve the biologically secondary skills of reading, writing and spelling.
Geary’s evolutionarily informed theory holds that ‘Folk domains represent universal forms of knowledge and competencies that emerge from a combination of inherent cognitive biases and evolutionarily expectant experiences’ (Geary & Berch, 2016, p. 219). By folk domains, Geary and Berch mean those knowledge sets and skills that humans have an evolved, biologically primary advantage for developing. These include social domains such as recognition of facial expressions, development of oral language, the emergence of theory of mind, and ecological domains such as folk biology and folk physics. Geary and Berch (p. 220) observed that Functionally, these abilities evolved because they allowed our ancestors to focus their behavior on attempts to achieve access to and control of the social (e.g., finding a mate), biological (e.g., food), and physical (e.g., control of rich territory) resources that tended to enhance survival or reproductive prospects during human evolution.
In his commentary on Geary’s work and its applications to education, David Didau (2017) noted its profound importance for educators, because it invites consideration of which knowledge and skill domains are biologically primary and which are biologically secondary. Didau cautions that If it’s a primary adaptation, then maybe we don’t need to teach it at all as children will have an innate ability to pick it up from their environments. That said, maybe we do need to make sure that children’s environments are conducive to acquiring the folk knowledge we all take for granted.
This gives pause for thought, then, on how a biologically primary skill set such as oral language (and in particular conversational discourse) should be supported and further developed in the context of mainstream schooling.
Snow (2020, p. 227) has commented that ‘. . . although oral language development is biologically primary and “natural”, it is by no means “set and forget”’. This is because a range of neurodevelopmental disorders (sometimes diagnosed, sometimes not) may impact on its development, and in reality, adults (parents and teachers in particular) invest considerable time into scaffolding the emergence of conversational discourse skills through real-time feedback and modelling.
We support a targeted approach going forward, in line with Abbot-Smith et al.’s recommendation that ‘To streamline clinician time and resources, future research studies should aim to investigate which elements of conversation interventions drive the effects for atypically developing children’ (p.631). To facilitate this, we recommend the application of a Response to Intervention framework (Fuchs et al., 2012), embedded within a broader Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) school-wide approach to conceptualising instruction and support (Brown-Chidsey & Bickford, 2015). In the case of conversational skills, this could entail consideration of a modified Response to Intervention (RTI) framework for teaching and intervention, interdisciplinary professional learning, positive behaviour support (a focus on both academic success and psychosocial wellbeing) and effective deployment of school-community connections in a culturally bespoke manner.
The key modification we would suggest here pertains to Tier 1 classroom instruction, where we would advise against committing curriculum time to the explicit teaching of conversational skills at the current time, given the lack of research evidence to support this, and the premium that is placed on pedagogical time in classrooms to meet existing curriculum requirements. When something is added to the school day, something else has to be removed or receive less emphasis. Our position is, we believe, supported by the fact that conversational skills are part of the biologically primary domain of human skills, as per the previously described work of Geary (2008) and Geary and Berch (2016). This by no means indicates that such skills cannot be improved and strengthened through classroom-based support, but we should expect the vast majority of students (80%–90%) to achieve proficiency across the childhood and adolescence years without specific instruction beyond the daily scaffolding, modelling and feedback provided by teachers during the school day. This reflects the fact that conversational discourse skills develop incrementally over a long period of time and rely to a considerable extent on concomitant development of executive functions, social cognition skills and theory of mind (Snow & Douglas, 2017) and of course proficiency in so-called ‘structural’ aspects of language such as vocabulary and syntax. In this sense, they are unlikely to be skills that can be accelerated via explicit instruction.
Instead of a population-based Tier 1 focus, therefore, we recommend enhancing teacher knowledge about typical and atypical conversational skill development and assisting them to use screening tools to identify and support students whose conversational skills are not progressing in line with age-expectations and/or are lacking in ways that cause the child functional limitations. In line with the principles of MTSS, we also recommend stronger pre-service preparation for interdisciplinary teamwork, in both teaching and speech-language therapy degree programmes. Key components of this model would, therefore, include:
1. Enhanced capacity for teachers to support children’s oral language skills more broadly, and conversational discourse skills specifically, in the classroom context.
This could take the form of improved content in initial teacher education programmes to ensure classroom teachers have a stronger understanding about oral language and how to support its development. This should be presented in the context of emergent executive functions (attention, self-monitoring, impulse control), social cognition and theory of mind. A recent review of pre-service training indicated variability in the content early childhood teachers receive throughout their pre-service university training in Australia (Weadman et al., 2021). A stronger focus on supporting children with oral language difficulties and conversational discourse skills throughout initial teaching degrees would ensure teachers are better positioned to identify and support children in classroom settings.
2. Effective screening of oral language and conversation discourse skills in school settings with regular progress monitoring, using valid and reliable classroom-based tools.
Provision of tools to identify students requiring additional assessment and support, in a timely manner would ensure students have opportunities to gain necessary skills. Teachers should also be knowledgeable about Developmental Language Disorder and Language Disorder associated with other conditions (Bishop et al., 2017), as conversational skills are likely to be impacted for many if not all children with such diagnoses. Appropriate screening and progress monitoring tools should be considered in the context of children’s cultural background, grade level and diagnosis. Ideally, structural components of language (i.e. morpho-syntax, vocabulary) and extended discourse should be considered.
3. The provision of Tier 2 (small group) support by classroom teachers and classroom support staff and Tier 3 (one-to-one services provided by a specialist, such as a speech-language therapist).
The inclusion of Tier 2 and 3 services would provide support to children in need rather than additional time at a Tier 1 for those who do not require this. The areas of focus would depend on the needs of the children receiving the Tier 2 and 3 supports but could include many of the conversational subcomponents outlined by Abbot-Smith et al. (2023) such as maintaining a conversation and following a conversation topic as it shifts. Such supports would also provide children with authentic opportunities to develop their conversational skills with their age-peers.
Applying an RTI/MTSS framework to the development of children’s conversational skills would provide fertile ground for a range of research methodologies, ranging from case-studies, through to longitudinal tracking and the use of experimental designs such as randomised controlled trials to evaluate the impact of different intervention approaches for strengthening children’s conversational skills, regardless of disability status and cultural and linguistic background.
