Diction SOS - Teaching an Autistic Person Language and Reading

Diction SOS

When my son was still learning to talk, with only a single word or two, (about age 4) we discovered he was totally fascinated by the alphabet. He couldn't talk, but he did learn the alphabet, and became obsessed with it. Sometimes, we heard, this can be an indication of "Hyperlexia" which is a form of language disorder, but not necessarily Autism, although apparently Autistic persons can have it.

A friend of mine had a son who had lost all his hearing due to an infection. They mortgaged their home to purchase a cochlear implant for him. The cochlear implant people recommended a rehabilitation program for him that included The Association Method for teaching children with language deficiencies. She taught me this method, and I used some of it in teaching my son language. He not only learned to talk better with this, but he also learned to read at the same time. (To this day, he has perfect diction, I think in part because when he was having trouble saying a word we could put it on a card using the phenomes and umlauts and then he would be able to "get it.") He wasn't always understanding what he read, but he at least had learned "the code" of language this way, by memorizing it. To him it was just a puzzle, or a code, not useful for anything yet, but at least we had sort of a "morse code" to start with in reaching him.

Here is a reference to a curriculum that includes this method:

TLDC: Teaching Language-Deficient Children
http://www.proedinc.com/customer/ProductView.aspix?ID=3921

"Theory and Application of the Association Method for Multisensory Teaching"

The gist of this method was putting the 42 English phonemes onto flash cards (umlauts and all) and having him memorize them. He was delighted to learn this "secret code" and thought it was fun. Then we taught him to read by using cursive, color, patterns, and visual repetition.

An Autistic person often can't see what a word unit is because they persist in seeing each individual letter as unique, and not a part of a whole. So by using cursive, the letters of each word are connected and only have a space between each word. The cursive style did not take any extra effort to teach him. It seemed easy for him to read the cursive part. He loved knowing where a word began and ended, and this made it much easier for him to sound out the word. We used different colors to differentiate sounds at first, and then used a different color for each word when doing sentences.

When doing words on a page, we let him pick the colors of bright markers, and wrote them in patterns on a plain peice of paper, for instance in a star pattern, or a step pattern, or in some set of circles, with about 4 repetitions to each page. Then we would point to each "step on the ladder" and say the word together. This made reading much more fun, and he loved the "patterns." We later did the same thing with short sentences, with about 4 - 5 repetitions in different colors on a page. It looked like story diagramming, but with the same sentence repeated instead of different concepts at different positions on the diagram. Each time we did this pointing and saying the sentence. Each word or sentence took about 15 repetitions, over short periods of a few minutes at a time, and perhaps taking a week to finish for him to learn it. Sometimes we put a coin, or a tiny sweet down on each word as we were pointing to it, which he could keep.

I also put words for common things around the house onto flash cards and taped them to the object they named. There was the word "Window" on all of our windows, and "Door" on all of our doors, for instance. I didn't do this all at once, a few items at a time, so he wouldn't get overwhelmed. Sometimes we would go on a treasure hunt and find all the window cards, then take them for a "prize" from the prize box. Then I would put up a different set of cards, like "mirror" for all the mirrors, and "phone" for all the phones.