Social Communicative Skills For A Group Of Autistic...

CAT: An Introduction Imagine what it would be like to try to teach social-communicative skills to a group of autistic teenagers who can often be uncooperative and stubborn, lack appropriate verbal and nonverbal communication, and have cognitive impairments that limit their ability to process information. As a twenty-year-old female college student, studying communication, I volunteered to be a peer buddy and a facilitator for a small group of teenage boys and girls, in a social skills training group for autistic teenagers called Peer Buddies. Without prior experience or knowledge in dealing with autistic spectrum disorder, figuring out a way to balance my accommodative strategies to both suit, yet expand each of these teenager’s existing†¦show more content†¦The purpose of this paper is to explain the major theoretical concepts of CAT, to describe the effects of the motives and strategies used to achieve various levels of accommodation, and to demonstrate its infinite practical applications— including a theoretical analysis of my experience with Peer Buddies. Communication Accommodation Theory The Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) was developed in the early 1970s by socio-psychologists Howard Giles, Donald Taylor, and Richard Bouhris. Originally labeled the Speech Accommodation Theory, it focused merely on adjustments of socio-linguistic behavior and how it was used to develop, maintain, or reduce social distance between people in interpersonal interactions (Giles Ogay, 2007). With additional research, refinements have been made to include both verbal and nonverbal (speech rate tone, accent, body language, personal appearance) communication, although it remains to be largely focused on verbal language. The theory later expanded to become multi-contextual. Meaning the theoretical concepts can be applied in virtually any context: interpersonal, intergroup/intercultural, organization, and media. I will further elaborate on examples of the intergroup context later on. As previously stated, this prominent and complex theory explains a nd predicts the communicative verbal or nonverbal adjustments that one chooses to make (or not) to either identify with or separate his or her self from another person or group (Giles