Using Presidential Debates to Teach Social Language Concepts

—— As a speech-language pathologist fascinated by social language, I recently thought about how I might incorporate the language from the presidential debates into treatment. The debates and campaign ads provide an engaging way to work with older students on reading nonverbal language, identifying emotions and connecting the race to the Common Core State Standards, particularly in social studies. You can search YouTube (of course, preview videos first!) for local and national campaign commercials or the complete debates. Watch and then use these timely videos to create activities aligned with the Common Core for students in grades seven through 12. Include questions to help students determine persuasion, bias, point of view, main idea and truth in context. Co-teaching with your social studies/history teachers can turn this into a collaborative lesson plan over several weeks, and gives you time to observe your students in the classroom working with their peers. Common Core standards for middle to high school include participating in group discussions, using media to enhance understanding of a topic, identifying evidence, perspective, reasoning, defining opposite points of view, determining evidence to support claims and more. So how do we use this is the context of a push-in lesson on social language? I would show this clip as an example of how to dissect the content and strategy of political commercials, and what we’re about to discuss. You can then start your less...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Tags: Speech-Language Pathology Autism Spectrum Disorder Language Disorders social skils Speech Disorders Source Type: blogs