Teaching Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Chapter Two Characteristics Associated with Autism Spectrum Disorders
“One must separate the variables of social
interaction problems from emotions.
People with ASD desire emotional contact
with other people but they are stymied by
complex social interaction.”
T. Grandin (1995). Thinking in Pictures
and Other Reports from my Life with
Autism. p44.
For more information on teaching social
communication, see Quill, K.A. (1995)
Teaching Children with Autism: Strategies
to Enhance Communication and Socialization,
and Quill, K.A. (2000) Do-Watch-
Listen-Say: Social and Communication
Intervention for children with Autism.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995) Mindblindness.
The extent of difficulty varies among individuals, but even those
of average intelligence may have difficulty with communication.
Implications for instruction
Effective programs for students with ASD include comprehensive
communication assessment and intervention. This typically involves
evaluation by a psychologist, an occupational therapist, an autism
consultant and a speech-language pathologist, as well as informal
observation and classroom-based evaluation. The evaluation helps
to identify the goals, objectives, and strategies that facilitate
development of receptive and expressive language skills, as well
as pragmatic skills. Instruction should emphasize paying attention,
imitating, comprehending, and using language in play and social
interaction. Communication goals should emphasize the functional
use of language and communication in various settings.
For more information on teaching communication skills, see
Strategies for Communication Development in Chapter 3.
Social Interaction
Students with ASD demonstrate qualitative differences in social
interaction and often have difficulty establishing relationships. They
may have limited social interactions or a rigid way of interacting
with others. Their difficulties with social communication should
not be seen as lack of interest or unwillingness to interact with
others. This lack of effective social communication may result from
an inability to distill social information from the social interaction
and use appropriate communication skills to respond.
Understanding social situations typically requires language
processing and non-verbal communication, which are areas of deficit
for people with ASD. They may not notice important social cues,
and may miss necessary information. People with ASD typically
experience difficulty in the use of non-verbal behaviours and gestures
to regulate social interaction, and in reading the non-verbal behaviour
of others.
People with ASD have significant difficulty with any interaction
that requires knowledge of other people and what they think or know.
It has been theorized that they have a social cognitive deficit in
this area, which Baron-Cohen describes as the “theory of mind”:
People with ASD may not be able to understand the perspective
of others, or even understand that other people have a perspective
that could be different from their own. They may have difficulty
14 Teaching Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders