The Broader Benefits of Teaching Language and Literacy to Students Across the Autism Spectrum

Empowering Communication and Jumpstarting Language Instruction

The most obvious benefit of language is that it empowers communication. At the most basic level, it empowers requests—e.g., for basic wants and needs. Beyond requests, it enables a variety of other linguistic acts: commenting, reminiscing, making future plans, asking questions, speculating. To perform these acts successfully, specific aspects of language are key: for commenting, among other things, a vocabulary of descriptive adjectives; for reminiscing, facility with past tense; for future plans, facility with future tense; for questions, facility with the complex syntax of questions; for speculating, the acquisition of conditional terms like “if,” probabilistic terms like “maybe,” and the syntax of conditional statements.

Then there is comprehension. The more language a language-impaired individual comprehends, the easier it is for his teachers to teach him more. At the beginning stages of instruction, the child’s comprehension empowers teachers to ask the child to “look at me” or otherwise verbally direct his attention to the focus of instruction. The direction to “look at me,” as we saw, is one of the first instructional prompts in the ABA teaching protocol and, when understood, can set in motion a series of teaching and learning opportunities—a virtuous cycle for language learning.

Reducing Frustration and Anxiety

Once a child has enough language to express basic wants and needs, he also has a major tool for mitigating the frustration and anxiety that are all too common in autism. After all, a common source of both frustration and anxiety is the inability to satisfy one’s basic wants and needs. In autism, basic wants and needs are often a function of sensory sensitivities, perseverative preoccupations, an extreme need for order and predictability, and a narrowness of focus that makes small details that most people do not even notice highly salient and potentially upsetting. Thus, compared with the wants and needs of typical children, those of autistic children are often far less transparent—crying out for clear verbal articulation.

Improving comprehension, which as we have seen is a major weakness in autism, can also reduce frustration. After all, a common source of frustration is not being able to understand what others say. On the flipside, when a child understands enough language, others can warn him ahead of time about unexpected changes (e.g., an upcoming fire drill), as well as explain reasons for unexpected or aversive occurrences (e.g., why we’re all getting out of a broken-down vehicle in the middle of a trip). Lack of access to explanations and warnings makes the world a much scarier, more unpredictable place—particularly for those who depend on structure and routines for their emotional well-being.

Even in situations where frustration or anxiety nevertheless arises, language still can come in handy—specifically for talking through those frustrations or anxious moments with others.

Most of the studies on language skills and emotional well-being are not specific to autistic individuals. Yet various studies, as we saw in Chapter 1, have found that language delays and deficits predict subsequent levels of anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and problems with emotion regulation. Given the above considerations, there is reason to suspect that such associations also occur in autism.