Students with Autism: How to improve language, literacy, and academic success

by Katharine Beals

Overview

Katharine Beals describes the root causes of the language and learning challenges in autism, their various academic consequences, and a variety of tools and strategies for addressing them. Drawing on what the most current evidence shows about the nature of autism and which therapies are most successful, Beals discusses the implications for autism-friendly instruction in academic subjects.

Complete acceptance of individuals on the autism spectrum means rethinking assumptions about autistic students, about how we teach expressive language, about how we teach reading comprehension, and about what and how we teach in the many K-12 classrooms attended by autistic students.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781915261373
Publisher:	Hodder Education Group
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Katharine Beals is the author of Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School. She has a PhD in linguistics and is an adjunct professor in the Autism Program at the Drexel UniversitySchool of Education, where she designed two of the program’s five courses.

She also teaches courses on autism at the Graduate School of Education at the Universityof Pennsylvania. She specializes in language and literacy acquisition in autism, language technologies for autistic individuals, educational challenges for students with autism, and the problems with Facilitated Communication as an intervention in autism.

She is a contributor at FacilitatedCommunication.org and also an autism parent.

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Chapter 1 What Is Autism? A Review of What's Impaired and What's Intact 11

Chapter 2 Not Attending to the Right Things: How the Core Deficits Affect Language and Learning 31

Chapter 3 How to Direct Attention and Break Things Down: Early Interventions for Language and Basic Skills 51

Chapter 4 Taking Language a Step Further: Why Sentence Grammar Is Key and How to Teach It Comprehensively 77

Chapter 5 From Sentences to Extended Discourse: Strategies for Teaching Broader Comprehension and Literacy 103

Chapter 6 From ABA to DI: What the Evidence-Based Autism Therapies Tell Us About What Works in the Classroom 135

Chapter 7 The challenge of Minimally Speaking Autism: Facilitated Communication Versus Evidence-Based Assistance 173

Chapter 8 Harnessing Strengths to Address Weaknesses 213

Chapter 9 In Search of "Double Empathy" and True Neurodiversity 247

Editorial Reviews

"Finally, a book with a truly comprehensive focus on autism-friendly curriculum and instruction, rather than another re-hash of how to create an autism-friendly classroom! Beals provides the best description of teaching language and cognition to children and adults with autism I have seen to date. I heartily recommend her book to all autism ABA practitioners."
Kent Johnson, Founder & Executive Director, Morningside Academy

From the Publisher