What Are They Saying Activity Workbook

Working With What Are They Saying Activity Workbook: A Practical Guide

The What Are They Saying Activity Workbook is a resource commonly used by speech-language pathologists, special education teachers, and communication coaches to build listening comprehension and pragmatic language skills. It targets the gap between hearing words and understanding intent — the difference between "what was said" and "what was meant." Students work through picture-based scenarios, facial expression matching, tone interpretation, and short dialogues that require them to infer emotional states and social meaning from limited cues. Each page typically presents a visual scene — a child standing alone at recess, two people talking with overlapping body language, or a character receiving unwanted news. The student picks from multiple-choice options or writes a short response identifying the speaker's emotion, the speaker's goal, or what should come next conversationally. The format looks straightforward on paper, but the cognitive load underneath is higher than most beginners expect. I ran a cohort of twelve kids through this workbook over a six-week stretch last fall, mostly third and fourth graders with language disorders. The first three pages looked easy — basic happy, sad, angry identification. By page seven, half the group started guessing randomly instead of actually reading the scene cues. That's not a workbook problem, it's a skill ceiling problem. The material assumes a baseline of pragmatic inference ability that some students simply haven't built yet.

My workaround was to front-load explicit teaching of the visual literacy pieces the book takes for granted: reading eye direction, shoulder posture, mouth shape in isolation, and object context. I spent two full sessions just looking at still frames and describing what each element communicates before we ever returned to the worksheets. It added time but dramatically reduced the random-guessing pattern. Without that step, students aren't failing the workbook — they're failing the unsaid prerequisite.

Where the Workbook Falls Short

The single biggest limitation I've encountered is the static nature of most exercises. Real conversations involve tone, pace, interruption, and repair. A printed cartoon face saying "I'm fine" with a slightly downturned mouth doesn't capture the vocal ambiguity that makes this skill hard in practice. Students can nail every page in the book and still have no idea how to respond when a peer says "whatever" in a flat voice at lunch. Another issue: the answer keys. Many versions of this workbook include answers at the back that are correct in a narrow sense but miss nuanced interpretations. A scene might show "correct" answers as "angry" when "frustrated" or "disappointed" would be more precise. For upper-intermediate students this creates confusion. I learned to treat the answer key as a rough guide rather than a rule, which means more prep work on the facilitator's end. If you're using this independently without clinical supervision, you may not catch those gaps yourself. There's also the cultural dimension. Facial expressions and emotional displays vary across cultures and neurotypes. Autistic students, in particular, may read the same scene differently than neurotypical peers — not incorrectly, but through a different mapping of internal state to external cue. The workbook doesn't address this, so facilitators need to decide whether to push conformity or validate alternative interpretations. I've seen this cause real friction in classroom settings.

Practical Implementation Notes

If you're bringing this into a session or lesson, don't rush through it linearly. Pick the pages that match your student's current level, skip the ones that are too easy or too far above, and return to them later. A typical 45-minute block works best when you do three to five items maximum with deliberate discussion between each one. Speed running through twelve pages in one sitting produces almost no skill retention. You'll get better results spending twenty minutes on three pages than forty-five on twelve. I also recommend pairing workbook items with live role-play after each section. Have the student act out the scenario themselves, then switch roles and perform it differently to explore alternate interpretations. This bridges the gap between selecting the right answer on a page and using the skill in an actual social context. The workbook builds recognition; the role-play builds production. You need both. For teachers working with a full class, the workbook works best as a small-group intervention tool rather than a whole-class lesson. The discussion component requires individualized prompting, and large groups tend to default to the quickest answer rather than the most thoughtful one. I've tried using it with entire classes of thirty students — it takes twice as long and produces half the engagement.

Download and Sourcing

The What Are They Saying Activity Workbook appears in several formats across educational marketplaces and speech therapy resource sites. Some versions are free PDFs shared on teacher forums, while others are commercial products bundled into larger pragmatic language units. When sourcing it, check the age range and skill level listed by the publisher. A version designed for kindergarten will bore a fifth grader with a language disorder, and a high-school pragmatics workbook will overwhelm a first grader. Match the difficulty to the student, not the grade. One thing to watch for: some uploaded versions online are scanned copies with poor image quality. The facial expressions and body language details become impossible to read at that resolution, which defeats the entire exercise. If you download a PDF, zoom into every picture before starting a session and verify the cues are actually legible. I lost a full session once because someone had uploaded a low-res version and none of us could distinguish between "surprised" and "fearful" in the second example. We just guessed and moved on, which was a waste of forty minutes.

Who Should Use This and Who Shouldn't

This workbook is appropriate for students who already have basic vocabulary for emotions and can follow simple multi-step directions. It is not suitable as a first-step intervention for students who cannot yet identify four or more basic emotions in themselves. Start with foundational emotion labeling before introducing inference-based tasks. Students with severe receptive language deficits may become frustrated quickly. The gap between what the page asks and what the student can process can be wide. In those cases, adapt the material by reducing choices to two options, reading questions aloud, and accepting oral responses instead of written ones. The goal is skill development, not worksheet completion. For neurotypical students looking for enrichment, the workbook will feel slow and simplistic after the first few pages. Consider supplementing with real-world media analysis — TV show clips, podcast conversations, or movie scenes — to stretch the skill beyond the page.

Bottom Line

The What Are They Saying Activity Workbook is a useful but limited tool. It fills a real need in pragmatic language development and works well when matched to the right student and paired with interactive follow-up. It does not replace direct instruction in visual literacy, cultural awareness, or live conversation practice. Used narrowly as a worksheet to fill time, it produces minimal results. Used deliberately with scaffolding and extension, it can move a student forward noticeably over a few weeks. The difference is almost entirely in how you use it, not in the pages themselves.