How Can Children With Autism Learn Communication Skills From Their Peers? Overcoming Mechanical And Inflexible Language

Course overview

For many children with an autism spectrum disorder, social and communication interaction styles can be characterized as appearing mechanical, scripted, robotic and routinized. Early verbal exchanges and later developing conversations with others often seem limited in scope, controlled and filled with data-based monologues. Instead, we would prefer children to be able to initiate topics of mutual interest, maintain and shift topics, as well as engage in topics initiated by others. We would like these topical and social exchanges to be flexible, reciprocal and contingent on the partner(s) previous utterances and shared topical interests. This course provides SLPs practical steps and strategies to move children with autism from unconventional, mechanical and inflexible verbal exchanges to conventional uses of language that is typical of friends, peers and classmates. Dr. Rydell will describe how children's language output represents and reflects how they think - how cognitive, social and communication abilities are interrelated. Additionally, a step-by-step process will provide SLPs with strategies for a) including peers as mentors, b) developing joint action routines, and c) embedding strategies that include a) learning from multiple partners, b) controlled variation, c) shared control, d) organizational systems, e) visual structure and f) social use of language to make and keep friends through the use of more conventional forms of verbal exchanges and conversation.