Landria Seals Green – Autism in Children & Adolescents: Advancing Language for Conversation Fluency and Social Connections

Outline

ASSESSMENT FOR LANGUAGE, SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND CONVERSATION FLUENCY

• Beyond the traditional speech-language assessment
• Primary tool for conversation, organization, expressive language and reasoning skills
• General education standards and Common Core Standards
• Integrate results for a comprehensive treatment plan

DESIGNING GOALS FOR LANGUAGE, SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND CONVERSATION FLUENCY

• Measurable goals and objectives for:
• Behavior and social intervention
• Language and fluency of skills
• Treatment plans and IEPs to support collaborative responsibility
• Proactively plan to teach skills across all settings
• When to design and plan for generalization

STRATEGIES TO DEVELOP EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE

• Align verbal behavior and traditional language therapy
• Declarative language skills and synonym usage for social and academic vocabulary
• Progress from single word utterances to multi-word word utterances
• Connect academic language learning and classroom participation
• Data collection strategies for expressive language intervention

STRATEGIES TO STRENGTHEN ORAL NARRATIVE SKILLS

• Improve narrative forms including story recall
• Incorporate opinions and perspectives into oral narratives
• Integrate body language and tone of voice in narrative presentation
• Add descriptive language to narrative skills
• Data collection in oral narrative skills improvement

STRATEGIES TO SUPPORT LANGUAGE AND REASONING

• Teach learners how to reason and make connections with vocabulary
• Connect receptive vocabulary and expressive language output
• Problem solving and reasoning skills for academic language

SOCIAL COGNITION STRATEGIES

• Conversation colors to support perspective taking
• Build “flexibility” in teaching sessions
• Problem-solving beyond finding one solution
• Perspective taking to support classroom behavior and relationships
• Problem solving and reasoning for social safety
• Data collection for social cognition

SOCIAL BEHAVIOR STRATEGIES

• Proactive strategies to support social behavior
• Social concept stories to explain “why” and “how”
• Incorporate social perspective taking into behavior contracts and token systems
• Data collection to provide reinforcement of improved social behavior

CONVERSATION FLUENCY STRATEGIES

• Connect expressive language to conversation fluency
• Verbal fluency under social timed pressure
• Conversation fluency to support generalization
• Coaching, shadowing, modeling in education and community environments
• Rhythm and music to support conversation fluency
• Data collection to track learner’s conversation fluency