1

Introduction

Autism is a brain development disorder that is characterized by impaired social

interaction and communication, and restricted and repetitive behavior, all starting before a child
is three years old. Autism has a strong genetic basis, although the genetics of autism are
complex. In rare cases, autism is strongly associated with agents that cause birth defects. Other
proposed causes, such as childhood vaccines, are controversial when the vaccine hypotheses lack
of convincing scientific evidence. What Causes Autism? The bottom line is, no one really knows
for sure what causes autism. Most experts will say that autism is probably caused by a
combination of genetic and environmental factors. Even those experts, though, do not have a
definite answer. For many people, this uncertainty is terribly frustrating. On the plus side,
interest in and funding for autism research is on the rise, so new and better information should be
forthcoming in the next few months and years. Autism affects many parts of the brain, and how
this occurs is not understood. Parents usually notice signs in the first two years of their child's
life. Early behavioral or cognitive intervention can help children gain self-care, social, and
communication skills. There is no known cure. Few children with autism live independently after
reaching adulthood, but some become successful, and an autistic culture has developed, with
some seeking a cure and others believing that autism is a condition rather than a disorder. Autism
is distinguished by a pattern of symptoms rather than one single symptom. The main
characteristics are impairments in social interaction, impairments in communication, restricted
interests and repetitive behavior. Other aspects, such as a typical eating, are also common but are
not essential for diagnosis. Individual symptoms of autism occur in the general population and
appear not to associate highly, without a sharp line separating pathological severity from
common traits.
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Summary On The Research Paper

This journal is researching about how the impact of social script and visual cues on
verbal communication could affect on autism spectrum disorders children. Children with autism
spectrum disorders exhibit impairment in social interaction, language and communication. They
often fail to make an eye contact with others and usually will only contact with their parents or
caretakers. Unlike other children with disabilities who compensate for their lack of language and
communication skills by gesturing or using non verbal means of expression, children with
Autism Spectrum Disorders ( ASD ) infrequently display spontaneous speech or engage in
conversations with other children or adults.Children with ASD may have problems to initiate
interactions eventhough they might respond well to the interaction. ASD childrens often have
difficulties in language and communication which include challenges with processing input and
generating output. An approach use to improve conversational skills within the children with
ASD is through the use of pretaught scripts. When children with autism are taught social sripts
through modeling, prompting, and reinforcement, their interactions with peers adults will
increase. Students with ASD benefit from the use of social scripts in nonacademic and academic
setting. This approach proven to be positively affect the language skills and peer interaction
among the ASD childrens. This social scripts activity use a lot of activity, which most of them
are visuall and audio approach rather than literally. For an example, Krantz and McClannahan
( 1998 ) examined the use of written scripts with three pre-schoolers childrens with autism who
had minimal reading skills. Students only initiated only one single-word request for toys or food.
The participants were taught to follow photographic activity schedules and they had improved by
this activity when they learned to approach adults when those words appeared. So, this journal at
the end use variety of methods in order to study the effect on ASD childrens. They use three
students with ASD to conduct the research with help from the research design and also setting
and materials use in the research. As the results, most of the participants shows positive
improvement in their communication and reading skills.
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Issue Brought Up By The Journal

This research paper had raised an issue among the ASD children. They want to know
wether ASD children can improve their communication and reading skills and what are the ways
they need to carry on to help them to improve. They think that ASD children which is part of
autism childrens group can develop their skills if they’ve been given chances and oppurtunities.
ASD children must be given chances to improve themselves with help from the others. ASD
childrens should be treated fairly equal compare to the normal children. They need special care
and special treatment as for their special needs. So, the researcher starts to run diagnosis and test
to the ASD childrens to find out how they they can work with them to improve their
communication and reading skills. In this research paper, researcher had chose to use social
scripts and visual cues on verbal communication as the method to work on with the ASD
childrens. The results will use as the indicator on how much will they improve if verbal strategy
use on them. If it’s not working well, researcher might have to use another method or need to
improve their strategies and research design. Maybe they need toi use a different setting and
materials or they might use different age of students as well. And if they had succed with the
method, they need to know how the method work on with ASD childrens. How the method help
the ASD childrens to improve their skills.
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Discussion Presented In The Paper

Prior research has demonstrated that the use of written scripts increases peer initiations
and promotes the continued use of unscripted exchanges in children with ASD, particularly those
with limited expressive language. In addition, these scripts were foundto generalized to seeting
other than those in which the scripts weretaught ( Krantz & McClannahan, 1998). As a result of
instruction in and subsequent fading of scripts, students with autism have learned to initiate
interactions with peers. Script instruction has resulted in increased peer initiations and unscripted
initiations ( Krantz & McClannahan, 1993). The present study demonstrated similar findings
using written scripts with students with ASD, though the fact that the participants engaged in
high rates of preservative speech complicated the interpretation of the result, particularly the
examination of unscripted statements. The present study contributes to the literature by providing
a partial replication of previous studies, further proving the efficaciousness of this intervention.In
addition, this study applied scripts to older, higher functioning, elementary-age students who
nonetheless had the significant delays in using sociocommunicative skills. Finally, this study
provides a variation on previous research with the addition of a visual cue used to decrease
repetitious speech that interfered with the participants’ abilities to communicate effectively with
peers. This study also would have been strengthened from the addition of generalization and
long-term maintenance. Overall, this study demonstrated that the use of scripts and visual cues
can increase communicative speech and decrease preservatives speech. The use of visuals is less
invasive and less socially stigmatizing than the verbal prompts or reminders. They are also less
distracting for other students who may be in the same classrooms as the individuals who are
using prompts and cues. In addition, such strategies have value to teachersin that they are easily
and quickly implemented with a minimum of materials. This research contributesto and extends
previous research on scripts and visual cues by reporting results with participants who engaged
in a large amount of preservative speech and by adding the use of a visual cue to the
implementation of visual scripts.
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Thoughts On The Issue

The important word in this issue is disorder. On the Autistic Spectrum is a small
area, about 3/4 of the way along. This is where most of us are in terms of behaviours and our
view of the world that we live in. It is very small, but within that area there is the whole range of
differences that make us different people. If a child, or an adult, has a disorder on the Autistic
Spectrum what this means is that they have aspects of their personality that give them a
different view of the world, different behaviours and sensitivities that take them out of that small
section and into the much larger area of disorders.Who decides where the line is drawn between
'normal' and having a disorder? We do. Society, educationalists, the law, psychologists, ordinary
people. There is a blueprint for what the expected behaviours should be or more accurately a
standard of expected behaviours and the people with disorders are those that fall outside the
'accepted norms'. Going back to the idea that giftedness is linked to Autistic Spectrum
Disorders. There has to be a clear correlation between the behaviours of the person and their
position on the Autistic Spectrum. While giftedness can lead to the behaviours associated with
Autistic Spectrum Disorders, it is more likely that the behaviours associated with Autistic
Spectrum Disorders will lead to giftedness.The other important thing to recognise, especially for
those people who prefer to resist the diagnosis of ASD as it suggests that there is something
'Wrong' with a gifted child, is that where diagnosese of ASD are made it is usually because there
is a belief that the individual needs additional support to assist them with recognised behaviours
and social interaction difficulties. As a byproduct these interventions, normally, also lead to
additional support for the giftedness of the child. We, as educationalists, are simply getting better
at recognising children who are having social, emotional and coordinational problems. It is also
true that current moves towards improvement in the assessment of individuals have also lead to
better abilities to pick up some of the discrepancies that would lead us to a view that a child has
some form of ASD. As far as the figures that have been quoted. They may be based upon
research, but they do not paint the whole picture because they do not include the full range of
ASD type problems. The latest figures that I can quote regarding this comes to the fact that about
1 in 10 of children is in some way affected by some sort of ASD.This means that in every class
in every school, on average, there will be 2 or 3 children affected. My opinion is that the
numbers are actually higher than this. Not every child that has an ASD problem needs
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intervetion, however, among young adults and older children the need decreases, not because
they have 'grown out of' the problems, but they have developed strategies to cope with it.