A Study On The Interaction Characteristics Of Children With Mental Retardation In Free Activities

Peer interaction is of great significance for the social development of children,as well as the children with mental retardation.The paper,by adopting the method of observation and taking part of the students that are from a school for the mentally retarded as the research object,is made to study the interaction characteristics of children in free activities from the aspects of communication partner,communication topic,way of communication and initiative of interaction.From the research,it found out that there are following features to the peer interaction of children with mental retardation.1.Features of the communication partnerFor selection of contact object,girls give little attention to gender of the contact objects,while boys are inclined to choose boys to contact.Mentally disabled of mild degree choose to associate with the one like them but seldom approach severely retarded;mentally disabled of medium degree prefer to contact the disabled of medium or mild degree and sometimes also approach severely retarded.2.Features of the communication themeFor contact theme,students of junior grade usually play games with each other while students of senior grade tend to linguistic contact like chat,being friendly and share.In addition,mentally retarded children of junior grade have low demand for contact and their contact is also shallow.It is common that mentally disabled of medium degree do not observe the contact rule and behave poor in courtesy.Dynamics domains the contact themes of boys,such as game,flaunt and attack,while girls prefer to chat and the proportion of chat in girls' contact theme is significantly larger than that of boys.3.Features of communication wayIn general,mentally retarded children of three classes mainly take action +language as their contact method and the proportion of language increases as they growup while that of action decreases.For communication,children of mild degree obviously have more ways than children of medium degree.For ways of communication,its proportion is obviously higher in mentally retarded girls than that in mentally retarded boys,but for action,girls have less ways than boys.4.Features of communication initiativeIn terms of contact initiative,mentally retarded children are generally active and children of senior grade have higher initiative.Underage children have much weaker initiative than the older children and mentally retarded underage children are easily affected by emotion in terms of contact content.Proportion of passive contact in children of medium degree is obviously higher than that in children of mild degree.Contact of mentally retarded boys and girls are oriented by initiative and the difference of proportion is not significant.According to the peer interaction characteristics of the observed object,I put forward some suggestions for education: the educators should strengthen the mentally retarded children's language ability and social skills training;cultivate children's participation consciousness,develop good habits;provide communication environment support,create communication conditions.