Talking Together

Talking Together encourages students to hold and maintain conversations with their peers in a natural setting, and makes it easier for speech and language pathologists to monitor pragmatic language goals.

A group of 2-4 students can participate in the conversation. Students sit around a table, placing the iPad in the center of the table and compete to participate in conversation by tapping on the GO icon when the topic is displayed on the topic icon.

Target goals can be specific to each student, and are assigned by the speech pathologist prior to initiating use of the application. There are total of 25 pragmatic goals included in this app and they are divided into 4 main goal categories:

Basic conversation goals: 9 goals, e.g. “The student can interrupt appropriately”; “The student can ask questions to find out what his/her conversation partner is interested in.”, etc.

Tone and body language goals: 8 goals, e.g. “The student can regularly look at his/her conversation partner”; “The student can make his/her voice sound like he/she is interested in the conversation.”, etc.

Turn taking goals: 4 goals, e.g. “The student can share the conversation.”; “The student can ask others about themselves”, etc.

Topic Maintenance goals: 4 goals, e.g. “The student can talk about the right topic.”; “The student can avoid talking too much about the same subject when others are not interested.”,etc.

There are over 100 topics included in this app and they are divided into the following categories:

About Me
Social Questions
School
Recreation
Favorites
Hypothetical questions
Would you rather questions
Talking Together app is easy to navigate and allows users to employ several tools to perform the following:

enter multiple students
change settings
enable or disable audio
enable or disable special effect sounds
track correct and incorrect responses
view reports in table and graphical forms
email and print results at the end of session

Author: Jennifer Rogers, M.A. CCC-SLP
Other apps by this author: Real Vocabulary
Developed by Virtual Speech Center Inc.