Social communication intervention for school-age children: rationale and description

Children of school age with social communication problems form a growing population in need of speech-language intervention. These children have difficulty not just with interpersonal communication, which underpins peer relations, but also with oral and written aspects of the curriculum. The importance of intervention in the school years therefore cannot be underestimated. In this article, a framework and rationale for intervention based on a consideration of social communication as the interdependence of social interaction, social cognition, pragmatics, and language processing are presented. A method of intervention for children with social communication problems is described. The method is illustrated by reference to a study of children with pragmatic language impairments in the United Kingdom. Social communication impairments are not specific to one diagnostic group, and therefore the intervention framework given here is applicable to a range of children with interpersonal communication problems in the school years.