The Relative Importance of Selected Communication Skills for Adolescents’ Interactions With Their Teachers

PURPOSE: This study investigated the opinions of high school teachers regarding the relative importance of selected communication skills for their students' communication with them and explored if the content areas in which the teachers taught or the amount of high school teaching experience they had were associated with their opinions. METHOD: Teachers ranked 14 communication skills according to perceived order of importance for Grade 10 adolescents' communication with them as teachers. RESULTS: Teachers tended to perceive skills associated with discourse management strategies as relatively more important than other skills. The two communication skills that were associated with metalinguistic/figurative language aspects of communication were ranked as least important. Inexperienced and experienced high school teachers tended to rank the importance of the communication skills similarly, as did sciences and humanities teachers, except for the communication skill of turn taking, which sciences teachers ranked higher than humanities teachers. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: The results provide guidelines for developing intervention approaches that can facilitate successful communicative interactions in high school environments and target goals that teachers of adolescents with language and/or learning disabilities perceive as more important for teacher-adolescent interactions.