Differential effectiveness of explicit verbal feedback on children's communication skills

Teaching Children about Verbal Referential Communication

The results of both experimental and naturalistic studies show that when young children are told explicitly whether the listener does or does not understand what the speaker means, they advance both in their understanding about message ambiguity and in their communicative performance. We report an investigation of how this explicit information achieves its effects.

In a comparison of five forms of intervention we found that when the explicit information was given immediately after the message, as in normal conversation, it was much more effective than when it was given at the end of an exchange. Under the former condition certain listening or speaking behaviours were imposed by the giving of the information. If this same behaviour was imposed without any explicit information, the effects on post-test performance were almost as great.

We interpret the results as suggesting that explicit information about listeners' understanding or nonunderstanding achieves its effects via changes in children's listening and/or speaking behaviour. We discuss how this might happen.

An Investigation of the Consequences of One Feature of Teacher-Child Talk for Children's Awareness of Ambiguity in Verbal Messages

The aim was to identify features of 5-and 6-year-old children's everyday lives which contribute to their understanding about the requirements of effective verbal communication. An analysis of naturalistic data comparing talk to children at home and at school indicated several features of adultchild talk occurring frequently at school but rarely at home. One such feature was the asking of question sequences intended to elicit a particular answer. The teacher continued to ask questions until that answer was supplied. In an intervention study we investigated whether this use of extended question sequences promoted children's understanding of ambiguity. The results showed that it did. There was also learning during the training itself. This feature of teacher-child talk may promote understanding of ambiguity because it draws children's attention to a distinction they often fail to make: between the speaker's intended meaning and the verbal message used to convey that meaning to a listener.

Generalization of Training Speaking Skills: The Role of Overt Activity, Feedback, and Child's Initial Level of Competence

72 children (mean age = 6–5) were assigned to 1 of 6 training conditions for speaking skills in a 2 (with or without feedback) × 3 (degree of overt activity) crossed design. Children in the active condition participated directly in three training exercises; each child in the passive condition observed the performance of the child in the active condition to whom he was matched; children in the active-passive condition received a combination of the two previous treatments. Children were given a pretest and immediate and delayed posttests, each of which was comprised of five tasks, four of which aimed at measuring possible transfer to other referential communication behaviors. Posttest evaluations showed that improvements in speaking behavior were related to the feedback condition, but not to the child's initial level of competence as assessed by global performance on the five pretest tasks. The reverse was true for the four transfer tasks. The amount of overt activity did not exert a significant effect on children's performance of any of the five tasks. Possible causes of the difficulty of obtaining transfer in training experiments are discussed.