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Focusing on communication intent
Communication intent means whether someone wants to communicate or not. By tempting children on the spectrum, we can teach them to start using a different way to communicate with us. The misconception is that teaching speech is the best practice. However, most of the time, we need to teach a child to have the initiation to communicate first. If we teach a child to use a form that they haven’t acquired yet, for example, speaking. Then are we teaching initiation or actually teaching speech? Teach 1 new thing at a time and focus on getting children on the autism spectrum to want to talk to us!

Prelinguistic skills & pragmatics
Children who are yet to use speech to express their thoughts and needs are sometimes labelled as prelingual or non-verbal. There are certain skills a child, and even those who are on the spectrum must master before they can start using speech as a means to communicate. To learn more about prelinguistic skills please watch this video from Laura: [ Ссылка ].

When we focus only on getting a child to talk, we ignore the need to teach different uses of language. Some children on the spectrum do get stuck at the stage where they will only talk when they want something. That’s what we call “requesting”, sometimes referred to as “manding”. There are other pragmatic functions to language. Sometimes we use it to comment on something, protest against something, ask for clarification, answer a question. It’s important we teach these functions in speech therapy.

Teaching strategies instead of how to-s
As the saying goes, it’s better to teach someone to fish rather than giving one a fish. As speech therapy isn’t as frequent as ABA therapy or other early intervention classes, it’s important that children have a strategy so that they can acquire more language themselves. This means they can learn ways to ask for clarification and what to do in order to achieve what they want. It’s important as well that parents learn strategies so that they can continue the work at home. The how-tos are very important, although not covered in this video. We wish that you have an understanding of why speech therapy would appear different from other types of therapy for autistic children.

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