A Comparison of Discrete Trial Teaching with and without Gestures/Signs in Teaching Receptive Language Skills to Children with Autism

Abstract

The present study was designed to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of two discrete trial teaching procedures for teaching receptive language skills to children with autism. While verbal instructions were delivered alone during the first procedure, all verbal instructions were combined with simple gestures and/or signs during the second procedure when teaching receptive language skills by using discrete trial teaching. A parallel treatments design was used to compare the differential effects of the two procedures on the acquisition of the receptive language skills. Two students with autism participated in the study. The results of the study showed that the discrete trial teaching procedure in which verbal instructions were combined with simple gestures and/or signs was slightly more effective and efficient on promoting the acquisition of receptive language skills for both students. Discrete trial teaching procedure in which verbal instructions were delivered alone was not effective for any of the training sets across students.