Teaching Approach for Developing Nonverbal Communication Skills in Students with Social Perception Deficits

Abstract

Social perception deficits are viewed as the most serious of all types of learning disabilities and yet little attention has been given to remediating such deficits. In Part 1 of this two-part article an approach for ameliorating such disabilities based on task analysis and diagnosis and prescription is described. Nonverbal communication skills are task analyzed into step-by-step sequences with a four-stage teaching approach: discrimination of specific social cues, understanding of the social meanings of such cues, appropriate usage of such cues, and application of such cues to actual social problems.

In Part 1, teaching activities based on this four-stage approach are given for the nonverbal communication areas of kinesics, or body language. In Part 2, teaching activities for these educationally less familiar nonverbal communication areas will be described: proxemics, or the use of space; vocalics, or the use of prosodic, paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic features; and artifactual cues such as cosmetics and clothing.