This text-based course is a written transcript of the live event, “Language and Literacy Concerns in School-Age Children with ASD,” presented by Tina Veale, Ph.D., CCC-SLP.
Click here for supplemental handouts and references.
>> Tina Veale: Thank you for participating in this discussion on language and literacy concerns in school-age children with ASD. This is an area that has been receiving a lot more focus in recent years. Interestingly in my career dealing with children with autism, we did not used to think about literacy quite as much. We thought it was a bit intriguing that children with autism could read words or were perhaps more interested in books than they were interested in talking to people. But we really did not think too much about instructing children in literacy. I am pleased to say that those days are behind us. Today we are going to take a look at some of the best strategies for dealing with language and literacy concerns in school-agers in this population.
I have provided the ASHA disclosure that some of you may be familiar with, the course abstract and the learner objectives for today. I will also orient you to the handout that includes the references for this presentation as it is a good bibliography of current literature in how to address literacy concerns in children with autism. We all have to be concerned with steeping our practice in evidence today, and that will provide some good resources to you.
Language and Literacy Concerns in ASD Learners
What are the language and literacy concerns in children with autism? As you know, for an autism diagnosis, all children on the spectrum have to present with a significant communication disorder. We may be dealing with children who have an ASD diagnosis who have really significant expressive and receptive communication deficits; problems across all major areas of language. We may see children who speak not at all or maybe just a little bit (minimally verbal children), all the way up to highly verbal individuals with quite good comprehension. Rest assured that everyone on the autism spectrum does present a significant communication challenge.
We know that linguistic competence or communicative competence at some level is necessary for literacy, and that the two are intimately connected. We no longer believe that a child needs to have specific communication skills before they are ready to become literate in some way. This is a huge advance in our knowledge. I do still see this idea around in classrooms that if a child cannot sort out all of the pictures of the “P words” (i.e. the words that start with the letter P), than they are not ready to read. But that really is counter to what we know now about literacy and teaching literacy to children with autism. That said, the more severe the language disorder, the more likely we are going to have more difficulty with literacy in school-age children.
What we have learned though is that going ahead and working on literacy-rich activities often brings out better language skills in children, and that the two are very closely connected. We also now believe that we can teach a set of literacy skills to almost all children in the autism spectrum.
What is Literacy?
Technically, what is literacy? What are we talking about? I think these are some of the best ideas that I have come across. You will see a number of definitions or descriptions of literacy, but today we do not just think of literacy as reading and writing. We think of it as the “effective use of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in everyday life” (Teale & Sulzby, 1986). I think that is a great definition that shows the connectedness between communication skills and reading and writing.
It is interactive, constructive, strategic, and meaning-based (Steelman, Pierce, & Koppenhaver, 1994; p. 201). It is a skill that is developed by interacting with children and in fact, literacy is something that is used in a very interactive way, whether we are interacting with text or interacting with another person, or both, when we are engaging in literacy activities. The main thing here is that it is meaning-based. This is something that we have to be very careful of when working with children with autism. We do know that many children with autism exhibit hyperlexia, or the ability to decode words when they really do not understand what they mean. We run into this problem again when we get into connected text and children who can read it, maybe even read it aloud, but not really fully understand its meaning. We always have to be sure that we are doing comprehension checks, so that we know that children are understanding.
