The effects of expansions, questions and cloze procedures on children’s conversational skills

Abstract

The effectiveness of expansion as a technique for facilitating children’s language and conversational skills is well known (Scherer and Olswang, 1984). Expansion, however, can appear alone or in combination with other techniques. Using a repeated measures design, this study aimed to compare the effects of expansion alone (EA); expansion combined with wh-questions (EQ); and expansion followed by a cloze procedure (EC) on the conversational skills of eight preschool children with conversational difficulties. Results showed that while there were no significant differences in child verbal topic maintaining responses across all techniques, EA elicited a significantly higher number of topic extensions, more non-verbal topic maintaining responses and fewer ‘non-relevant responses’ from the children, than either EQ or EC. The positive effects of each technique on the pragmatic appropriateness in conversations suggest that they could be used strategically in language intervention to ensure greater therapeutic effect.

• conversational skills
• facilitative techniques
• topic extension
• topic maintenance

Acknowledgement

We wish to acknowledge and thank Claire Miller, Lee Bennetts and Sonja Carpenter from the Champion Centre, Christchurch, for conducting the experimental sessions of this study; Jan Murphy, Senior SLT at the Champion Centre, for facilitating the study from which this article is drawn; Dr. Chew Theam Yong and Wei-Lun Chiu for software development and assistance; Dr. Emily Lin for assistance in statistical analysis; Jayne Moyle and Victoria Askin for reliability verification; and all the child participants and their families for their kind participation in this study.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.