FAQ 4
As speech-language pathologists, we are uniquely qualified to understand and support the receptive and expressive communication demands of social interaction and social problem solving. We see social skills through a “language lens.” Because of our language training in discourse skills, oral narrative development, word retrieval, language formulation, making inferences, predicting outcome, and language processing, we are best equipped to develop these skill sets in students. We can assess whether they have the underlying language foundation skills so that they can fully participate in the complex and rapid exchange of ideas, comments, questions, negotiations, arguments, and the friendly banter of conversation. In addition, as language clinicians we are skilled in helping our students learn to read social cues, recognize body language and facial expression, take another’s perspective, as well as infer emotion and intent from tone of voice and affect. We can help them understand the subtle language nuances of friendly teasing vs. mean teasing, sarcasm, figurative language and code-switching from a language perspective.