Visual Supports to Build Use of Socially Appropriate Nonverbal Behaviors

Measuring personal space at the Worsley School

Most of our posts are about teaching language, but today we take a little side trip into nonverbal communication. We’ve all worked with folks who have difficulty maintaining appropriate distance and making eye contact, and know how problems in these area can really impede a person’s ability to relate well to others. Our video for this week, from Autism Teaching Strategies, illustrates how to use pictures supports to teach appropriate nonlinguistic conversational behaviors.
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Of course, we were drawn to it because of our own experience that using pictures as a reminder is much easier to fade than oral language prompts (e.g., ‘Don’t forget to look at me when you talk;’ ‘Quiet hands’).

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What we also love about this video is the teaching strategy: role reversal. In this strategy, the SLP (or teacher/parent) provides a model of both positive and negative examples of the target skill. The learner’s job is to look for ‘mistakes.’ What kid doesn’t like to correct his/her therapist?! Fun stuff! It’s motivating, but more importantly, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component.
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Enjoy!

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