Autism: how we taught speech and language.

While it might sound obvious, if your child has autism or a speech and language disorder, your ability to practice language with your child becomes very restricted. I think the key word here is practice. I remember Conor turning 10 years old and thought my god, if he and I have 2 or 3 language interactions a day that was it. I thought it’s no wonder he can’t communicate.

It was at this point that I realized I desperately needed to get some form of communication in place beyond Conor just manding me. At the rate we were going Conor was never going to learn speech and language. We had also used picture exchange (PECS) but the language was very limited and the moment seemed to be lost by the time the right picture was found in his PECS folder. Yet the use of images to communicate ideas seemed sound, its just that it was very limited and frustrating.

It was this realization that led us on to creating the ALL program and from this discovery we started growing literacy in the boys. The key here was to teach concepts in context from video clips and to connect these clips to images and text. It was very involved in the beginning with a room full of screens and computers, but the boys led the way in helping us refine  how to teach them language.

And this was only the beginning. I got a white board and I started asking the boys to do things for me. It started very simple like GET WOODY and over time we built up vocabulary. We labelled everything in the house from the attic to the basement. This made generalization of the learned language really easy.

As we worked on the ALL program and followed the generalization activities described we went from a couple of communications per day to several hundred. And not just me communicating, Conor’s favorite phrase was I WANT……… and within reason he got what he asked for with a heart and a half.  When the boys started to use and build speech, I spoke as I wrote.

We were now truly into the “practice” of language.