Some Approaches to Teaching Autistic Children

a special class in an ESN school, a group for handicapped children in a normal day nursery, an American day school for seriously disturbed children and an English school, recently opened, which is specially for autistic children. One of them concerns the teaching of children with aphasia, which is relevant to the main theme because speech disorders of the aphasic type are extremely common in autism. The final contribution is by a child psychiatrist, who describes the syndrome, the differential diagnosis and the handicaps from which autistic children suffer. Despite the different backgrounds of the authors, there is a surprising measure of agreement between them. The difficulty of comprehension and execution of speech is seen as the central problem, with visual perceptual handicaps as a frequent complicating factor. One of the biggest hurdles a teacher has to surmount is the resistance to