"You're Going to Love This Kid!" Teaching Students with Autism in the Inclusive Classroom by Paula Kluth, Paul H. Brookes Publishing, 2003.
If a teacher is giving verbal directions, she might also provide the same directions on
the chalkboard. Students might take turns writing daily
assignments on a classroom homework chart. A
daily schedule might be posted and maintained by teachers and students together (with
icons representing activities, if possible).
Many students with autism, in fact, seem to comprehend written text better than speech. Wendy Lawson (1998), a woman with autism, provides
insight on why one is easier than the other:
I find the written word much easier
to comprehend than the spoken word. It takes
me a lot longer to process conversation and work out the meaning behind the words than it
does to scan the words on a written page. I
think this is because I must also read the expressions on a person’s face and study
their body language. (p. 9-10)
One student I know found the written word so important to his success that he often asked me to converse with him on paper whenever possible. During even the shortest exchanges, he preferred to talk on paper. He would type short answers and I would write to him in longhand. While we could not engage in conversations in this way every time he requested it, I tried to dialogue this way with him when time allowed. He found these exchanges on paper to be more calming, comforting, and easier to comprehend than those he participated in verbally.
His middle-school teachers also found that the
written conversations were perfect opportunities to engage him in lessons related to
literacy. For instance, we would add new
vocabulary to our written messages every week. We
would also take advantage of these natural opportunities to teach him about written
expression. Since typed and written words do
not always reflect tone, inflection, and emotion and since cracking, raised, or booming
voices are not available in these texts, we needed to teach this young man about how to
send those messages to his communication partners. We
were able to use this absence of verbal communication to naturally teach the student the
use of ending and quotation marks and the importance of descriptive language. This student was then able to teach his classmates
about communicating clearly using written language, which helped all students improve the
e-mail messages they sent weekly to their cyber pen-pals.