Once, I was at a school observing a program where a child was engaged in a social skills program to learn conversation skills:
Student (reading from a script): “What are you going to do on your vacation?”
Conversation Partner: “I’m going to Miami.”
Student: “What are you going to do in your Ami?”
I think this is a fascinating response. Not just because it is an amusing anecdote. But because it highlights a fundamental problem with the way social skills and language instruction is often conducted.
This student clearly had clearly learned a social “rule.” Something like, “After the initial conversation starts, ask a follow up question.” The problem here was the student didn’t seem to have any interest in having a conversation. He didn’t care at all about where the conversation partner was going on vacation or even talking to that person at that time. If he really wanted to know about his conversation partner’s vacation plans, his follow up question would have been “What is an ‘Ami’?” The student was working with a motivation system where if he completed a series of activities, he would earn a reward. He was just trying to finish his activities to get the reward.
Now, there is a lot of literature with different approaches to attempt to solve this type of problem. As always, more research is needed. But the key lesson for practitioners is that just getting the response to look right doesn’t mean that you have taught anything useful. Probably, the student in the above scenario would have looked great 90% of the time. The school could have shown many of his conversations at conference presentations as examples of how well their social skills program works.
But we know better now. Someone may learn to have a superficial conversation and look appropriate. But surely it won’t generalize to natural situations or friendships unless they are engaging in conversation because they care about the answers, not simply earning the contrived reward at the end of the conversation.