Not Just Talking

Identifying Non-Verbal Communication Difficulties - A Life Changing Approach

Sioban Boyce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351688390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This innovative approach to dealing with communication difficulties was devised by the author following encounters with increased numbers of children who had learned to talk, but still were unable to communicate effectively. This new theory of communication development devised in the late 1990s has been successfully used by the author and a wide range of educators and promotes the good use of non-verbal skills in children. This programme changes the lives of the children (in the family and at school) who benefit from it. The book will look at: Non-verbal communication theory; Normal and disordered development; Problems arising - behaviour; social skills; emotions; education; in the family; Prevention; Assessment; and, Intervention. Generally those children with poor non-verbal skill development will have limited ability to communicate effectively in all situations and may even be 'shut down', i.e not attempting to communicate unless they choose to. This flagship book provides a whole new perspective and presents a concrete alternative approach to tackling the fundamentals from which communication difficulties arise.

1 Introduction: Turning Things around

This book is about how the non-verbal communication skills that underpin our conversational ability are less likely to develop in the twenty-first century and the serious consequences for society of people growing up being able to talk but not to communicate. It introduces a new theory based on the skills children need to develop in the area of non-verbal communication. Widespread changes in society beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century mean that children have fewer opportunities to develop these essential communication skills.

The book begins by establishing the need for a new theory of communication development. It looks at research that supports this new theory and how it differs from current theories relating to child development. I then establish which skills we use as adults within a conversation that are the focus of this book and how central these skills are to our everyday life.

Section 3 looks at what has happened to change the way our children learn to communicate. There are then five sections covering the development of non-verbal communication skills from birth through to old age.

Once the ‘normal’ development has been explained, I look at the problems associated with failure to develop these non-verbal conversational skills. This is followed by an outline of the solutions I have developed, ranging from prevention through assessment to the Not Just Talking intervention techniques. This is followed by an outline of the training opportunities for all these three aspects of the solutions.

Conventions

Throughout this book I use 'he' and 'she' in different sections when referring to the child. Readers should assume that I am talking about matters that affect both boys and girls, unless I specify otherwise.

The Not Just Talking Theory of Communication Development

Current theories of the development of communication are predicated on language development. Most books, manuals and tests focus on the skills concerned with language comprehension and use. In education services for children with special needs it is understood that there are skills that precede language development, but even these programmes are based on attaining language development with a particular focus on speech.

Makaton, a signing programme that started in the 1970s, is an example of this. This programme made the assumption that the child needed to develop normal use of language and therefore the signs were introduced on this basis, establishing single noun use and then adding verbs, and so on.

The Intent to Communicate programme which was developed in the south of the UK in the late 1980s looked at what happened before the child began talking, and advocated steps that culminated in understanding and use of language skills, such as ‘request action’ and ‘request object’.

In child development books for parents there is little about communication in the early months of the child’s life, apart from information about babbling and listening skills. Again, this relates to language production and improving the chances of the baby learning to understand language.

This book hopes to show that language is actually an outcome of the development of non-verbal communication skills – none of which relate to language. If language starts, particularly spoken language, before these non-verbal skills develop sufficiently, then the child will learn to talk but may not be able to communicate effectively.

How this theory differs

This theory of communication development focuses on non-verbal communication skills, not verbal language. It shows how the development of non-verbal communication precedes, underpins and leads into the effective use of verbal language skills which we use to speak to one another.

In this book you will also discover why concentration on verbal language alone is no longer appropriate and can even be detrimental to the child’s communication. The book aims to explain why children are growing up with so many communication problems nowadays and points to solutions which are cost-effective, simple, lasting and based on 15 years’ successful experience of working in this way with children.

In the book I deal mainly with the development of essential non-verbal communication skills and what happens when they are lacking. These skills account for 60-90 per cent of how we understand the spoken message. As a by-product it is impossible not to mention the development of verbal communication occasionally, as this is a natural progression when good non-verbal skills are established.

Effective communication requires the development of a combination of many different skills that come together in the first five years of a child's life. The complex mix of elements related to language, such as grammar, vocabulary and articulation, is fully recognised. However, the non-verbal aspects of communication are by far the largest element. They are far-reaching and continue to mature over a lifetime. Verbal language development on the other hand reaches a peak by about the age of five years, and only the vocabulary develops after this as a person accumulates experiences where specific words are necessary.

Current understanding of non-verbal communication

In the late 1960s, ground-breaking research into communication and body language by Professor Albert Mehrabian (2007) found that in situations of confusion or inconsistency, 7 per cent of the message was conveyed by the words, 38 per cent by the voice and 55 per cent by the face. It was assumed by those interpreting his research that, by adding up the two figures, 93 per cent of communication was non-verbal at any one time. Since then, this interpretation has been discredited. The reason given is that the 38 per cent that Mehrabian attributed to the voice concerned spoken language and should not be added to the non-verbal side of the equation. But this way of interpreting Mehrabian’s research demonstrates a lack of understanding of what constitutes the nonverbal element because it sees the ‘voice’ element that Mehrabian discussed – what is known as the prosodic element – as relating to verbal language development. This book will demonstrate how this ‘vocal’ element is in fact non-verbal because it refers to the way we change or add to the words using non-verbal features such as stress or intonation pattern.

Although Mehrabian’s research was among the first to identify a dependence on facial expressions in particular to make good sense of complicated messages, what he didn’t research was the effect of other non-verbal factors present in communication, which have more to do with the situation than what the person himself is conveying. In fact, his research focused only on how emotions are communicated through facial expressions and the like.

Being the only real research available on this specific point, my interpretation now shows that if we add body language and other supra-verbal communicating factors to the information given by the situation to aid comprehension of the verbal language, then the importance of non-verbal clues becomes even greater. By revisiting his percentages you will now see that at any one time, 60–90 per cent of communication is non-verbal – mostly relating to assisting comprehension of the spoken message.

Other views on the importance of non-verbal communication

Other writers have identified the importance of non-verbal understanding in adult life. Malcolm Gladwell (2005) has spoken to many researchers and writes about what he calls 'thin slicing' - the ability to process all the non-verbal information in the 'blink' of an eye and make a split-second judgements about what is going on. He reports that in adults this first interpretation is often the correct one, and we should be aware of its potential. Adults may change their minds after reflection, but later evidence often demonstrates that the first impression was accurate. My contention is that we also use this 'thin slicing' skill subconsciously to make moment-to-moment decisions about whether to say something, what to say, and how to say it. What Gladwell talks about is a very high-level skill that we develop in our teenage years, based on the development of the basic but essential non-verbal communication skills described in this book.

The experience that led to this new theory

Having trained as a speech and language therapist in the 1970s, I worked for nearly 20 years in the National Health Service. In the early 1980s children started entering my clinic, only one or two of them at first but many more by the end of the decade, whose verbal communication didn’t seem to be a problem. These children were referred because their verbal understanding was slightly depressed, but it was difficult to tell from the standardised speech and language therapy assessments whether the child couldn’t understand or was choosing not to answer (a significant problem associated with testing children with non-verbal difficulties, especially those on the autistic spectrum).

In the early 1990s, I was Head of Speech and Language Therapy for Learning Disabilities with a health authority. It was during this time that I became aware of the strong connection between challenging behaviour and communication problems. Since no one seemed to know the real reason why this was happening, I started looking at the research into what babies do in the early days of life. It was from this that I developed a new way of looking at communication and started to devise different ways of intervening with the children.

Speech and language models

The speech and language models applied in those days to the clients of learning disability services appeared to me to be a paediatric model based solely on speech and language development. The available assessments identified language problems: was the child or adult able to understand the information-carrying words and could they articulate and use vocabulary and grammar appropriately?

Based on this information, an intervention was planned to promote language use at the appropriate level towards the target of speech. Programmes devised would:

• improve auditory discrimination, memory or sequencing problems
• promote the production of sounds such as /b/, if the child was able to put his lips together, or other sounds
• help a child who couldn't understand colours or other adjectives to make sure he 'knew his colours', or the difference between 'big' and 'little', for example.

The fundamental problem experienced at that time, and it is probably still true 20 years later, was that this method of intervention improved skills in clinical settings, but the child found generalisation in the outside world difficult. This applied to all children, even those in mainstream schools.

By changing the emphasis to promoting only non-verbal communication skills, the Not Just Talking intervention programme's outcomes have generalisation at the centre. Once these skills are at the right level, language skills flow whatever the circumstances.

The Not Just Talking vision

With regard to those people with a learning disability, whether verbal or not, applying this paediatric model appeared to be saying: ‘We have a secret society called “language”: we can all do it, so come and join us.’ I asked myself some simple questions. Should those who can communicate try to get people with learning problems to pick up a new and complex skill of verbal language so that they can reach our level of communication and talk to us? Or was it easier for us, as good communicators, to start at the level of those with a learning disability and help them progress in simple steps from there?

This led to an end of the paediatric model in my department and the appearance of a model that valued the level of communication that had been achieved in each individual client, and then built their non-verbal skills from that point towards better communication. This vision is at the heart of all the methods of intervention and support used by Not Just Talking.

We made our communication as simple as the client needed so that he could understand what was being communicated. We made no assumptions about his level of understanding of language. Assumptions were also never made about what he was thinking, so reasons for his behaviour were not attributed, unless he could communicate what he was thinking for himself.

We used other methods of communication, such as objects, pictures, symbols, and so on, but always backed this up with help to develop facial interest and a sound understanding of what faces tell us, as well as all the other non-verbal clues described in this book. Situations were enhanced with obvious visual clues to act as pointers to the signals that tell us how to understand situations. The whole approach was to give support to the client to take control of his communication. When he no longer needed the supports, they were withdrawn and he progressed to the next level of communication.

Communicative settings

No client should be put in situations where carers are chatting away using language at high levels, which may include banter, if the client's communication and language skills are functioning below a five-year-old level. Children or adults with poor non-verbal understanding will not pick up language and communication skills just by listening. It will wash over them and may end up seriously confusing them. These essential nonverbal skills have to be developed first. The child's expressive language skills might well be commensurate with his age level, but if non-verbal skills lag behind, the same applies: he will not understand what is being said and will not learn simply by being exposed to conversations.

Another problem associated with pursuing a speech and language model of intervention is that the focus of the intervention is to promote the language skills of the child. If the child's non-verbal skills are far behind - 14-year-olds can be functioning at a pre-threeyear level with regard to non-verbal communication - all language intervention does is develop his language skills. The consequence of this is that the gap between his good expressive language skills and his poor conversational skills just gets bigger.

Why a New Model Is Needed

The speech and language model of communication development is not the only model to fail to address non-verbal communication. Other forms of support and therapy for children are commonly planned on a similar basis.

Psychotherapeutic model

Midwives tend to focus on establishing bonding between babies and parents based on a psychotherapeutic model of communication which sees bonding as the first step in the interaction between parents and their new baby. This is based on developing a loving relationship with your baby. This loving relationship is believed to promote care and attention from parent to child and hence the well-being of the infant.

After reading this book, you will understand how, before bonding can happen, the baby needs to develop non-verbal communication skills. It is these fundamental skills that enable bonding to take place. Many parents struggle to bond with babies. However, the Not Just Talking approach takes the blame away from the baby and the parent and gives parents something functional to work on. This is something which takes place between parent and child without the emphasis on success or f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: turning things around
• 2 Non-verbal conversational skills
• 3 The causes of non-verbal communication problems
• 4 Baby development
• 5 Toddler development
• 6 Primary development
• 7 Teenage development
• 8 Adult development
• 9 Problems associated with poor non-verbal communication
• 10 Prevention
• 11 Assessment
• 12 Intervention
• 13 Training
• References
• Index