The Importance Of Communication
Some parents and professionals in contact with people with autism frequently mention how difficult it is to communicate with people with autism. Others are not aware of the significant communication difficulties that people with autism experience, but do suffer the consequences of communication breakdowns.

I have worked with both professionals and people with autism for over ten years and would like to share some recommendations to facilitate the very complex communication process between both. I hope you will find this information useful.

What Happens When People With Autism Don’t Understand?
When we speak with someone with autism and they do not understand, it is likely that we will observe the following behaviour/s:

- They do not respond to our request/s

- They do something apart from what they have been asked

- They get anxious and stressed as they feel they are not fully understanding what we are trying to tell them

- They display challenging behaviour

Why Might People With Autism Not Understand?
- Attention difficulties. People with autism might find it difficult to swich their attention from one stimulus to another. If they are focused on a particular task and we give them instructions, they might not be able to quickly switch their attention to us.
They can also find it hard to discriminate what stimulus they need to pay attention to. This means that if for example two people are talking at a time, they might find it hard to discrimiate our voice over the non-relevant one.
Additionally, people with autism can have short attention span so might struggle to proccess long instructions.

- Environmental distractions and noise level can make it very difficult for some people with autism to focus on our messages.

- Memory difficulty
- …or it might be their level of clinical understanding. Some people with autism have significant language difficulties so will struggle to understand complex language.

To Be A Good Communicator You Should…

- Reduce the amount of talk

- Use single words or very short functional phrases to increase students’ level of understanding

- Map words exactly onto aspects of the situation in hand

- Create a calm learning environment

- Support verbal instructions with visual material such as objects or pictures

- Make the environment visually and auditorily simple. Avoid any unneccesary language, noises and visual clutter which will make it very hard for people with autism to focus and concentrate on the relevant information.

- Give people with autism time to take in questions/instructions and to work out their response. People with autism need longer to process information so it is important that you give them the necessary amount of time to both understand what you have told them and to appropriately respond to your instructions

- Repeat instructions using exactly the same words. If despite of giving the person with autism enough time to process the information, he does not respond to it, it is important that you repeat the instructions using the same words again. If you change the words you will cause confusion as the new sentences will not be identified as meaning the same and the person with autism will need to start the decoding process again.

- Never force eye contact. Establishing eye contanct seems to be the norm between people without autism. However, this is just a conventional rule that does not suit the needs of people with autism who might find eye contact too overpowering. Some people with autism find it really hard to establish eye contact and focus on the auditory stimuli at the same time so do not ask them to look at you while you are talking to them if you want them to understand the message!

- Respect students’ personal space.

- Position yourself sideways on and so that your eye level is below theirs.

- Never fill in silence with small talk. People without autism can feel unconfortable in a social situation when noone talks. However, silence is actually very imporant for people with autism as it enables them to process information before they can respond.

- Listen, accept and respect

- Repeat target words several times to give them a fair chance of understanding

- Observe the person with autism and become aware of the things they do which are communicative or potentially communicative and respond appropriately

- Create highly interesting activities for them.

- Never compete with other adults. If more than one person are interacting with somebody with autism, decide who is talking at each particular moment.

But Remember…

Each individual with autism has his/her particular strengths, weaknesses and needs. Although I have given some general recommendations which tend to be good practice when working with autism, it is important to always follow the recommendations from the speech and language therapist for each particular student.

If you require further information, please visit my website and contact me.