Teaching Listener Responding to Children with Autism

Children with autism typically have difficulty communicating with others, lack some social skills, and perform unusual behaviors or rituals. Without effective treatment they are unlikely to be able to learn in traditional school or pre-school settings. Applied Behavior Analysis offers the most effective treatment for autism: Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention. It involves identifying children as early as possible, assessing the child’s learning needs, and setting up structured learning opportunities with clear instructions, fun and exciting consequences, and repeated practice until the child has learned the skill. These structured learning opportunities are called Discrete Trial Teaching (DTT) sessions. One area of language that is often taught in DTT is listener responding, which is generally described as following verbal directions. Effective listener responding allows you to respond to people and things in the environment. Using a Behavioral Skills Training approach and extensive video modeling, this tutorial shows how to use DTT to teach listener responding skills to learners with autism or any special learning need.