| This investigation examined the effects of conversational skill training on the development of communicative competence. A multiple baseline, single-subject design was employed with two conversational dyads comprised of two third grade and two fourth grade boys. These boys were identified as language and learning handicapped and were receiving both regular and special education instruction concurrent with speech and language therapy.;The intervention procedure consisted of instruction in the formulation of Wh questions and responses. This was accomplished through the use of the direct instruction techniques of modeling, behavioral rehearsal with corrective feedback, and social reinforcement regarding the explicit conversational activities of question-asking, question-responding and elaborating. This procedure was sufficient for the fourth graders, to increase their skills, while the third graders required an additional intervention procedure comprised of having the experimenter prompt question-asking for a time.;This investigation examined components of both syntactic-semantic and pragmatic conversational aspects of communicative competence.;Three research questions were answered. First, Loban's (1976) indicators of fluency, namely communication units, mazes, and the proportion of the total conversational context comprised of mazes was examined as the syntactic-semantic component. Examination of pre- and post-intervention scores showed that three of the four boys increased their oral language fluency. Second, a discourse analysis examined the children's use of language functions, particularly requests, responses, assertions, and regulators, with an additional category of uninterpretable statements. All four boys made positive gains in their use of the various functions. While requests and responses increased, the need for regulatory statements decreased as the conversations became more precise and understandable. In addition the number of uninterpretable statements dramatically decreased. Third, all of the boys developed the use of conversational strategies to enhance the interactive quality of their conversations while they also increased in their ability to sequence a conversation across ten turns.;Implications for future research, including suggestions for using these dependent measures for analyzing older children's conversations are offered as well as suggestions for educational practice. |
