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Non Verbal Learning Disorder Child (NVLD) or Asperger's Disorder Child: Intervention Strategies

Weekly skills support at school or outside of school needs to be in place to assist NVLD and AD children with many aspects of their academic and their social development.

Academic Support

1. Reading comprehension support and strategies such as teaching the child how to highlight key words, concepts, and ideas present in the text, can be very useful. Teaching the child to sort out primary and secondary ideas in a consistent, systematic fashion is critical to developing skills that will allow comprehension of material at their grade level.

2. Systematic, step-by-step review of key ideas and concepts of the content areas of the curriculum including science and social studies, may be needed. Ideas, concepts and procedures must be explained, verbally, in a sequential, step wise fashion and rehearsed in a slow, repetitive, and highly redundant manner.

3. Outlining skills are almost always needed to help the child organize written work. By not having well developed visual spatial skills, information is often not categorized in “user friendly” ways, and requires assistance by support staff and parents in order to teach compensatory strategies for organization.

Social Skills Support

The NVLD or AD child should be provided with pragmatic language therapy to tackle the child’s social communication/pragmatic needs, which can then further reinforce reading comprehension and writing organizational skills.

A language therapist could offer strategies for utilizing language to organize both verbal and non-verbal information. She could also help him to decipher non-verbal modes of communication. Some specific strategies might include:

1. In the domain of pragmatic language skills, specific training on what to say, how to say it and when to say it. This is particularly important as these children rely on their verbal skills as a primary way of gathering information about a new or complex situation. Helping him/her ask the right questions in the right manner will improve their efficiency, the clarity of the response elicited, and the social acceptedness of his verbal behavior.

2. In the domain of social communication, the child might be encouraged to describe in detail important social events, in order to learn to appreciate the significance of his own behavior, the behavior of others, and the effects of one upon the other. For example, if there were an incident on the playground in which the child experienced some interpersonal difficulty, he could explain in detail what occurred and what he perceived as the cause of the incident and its effects. He should be encouraged to focus on the relevant aspects of the situation and to de-emphasize the irrelevancies. Through discussion they could become aware of discrepancies between his own perceptions of the situation and the perceptions of others involved. Having the child then “re-teach” the procedure or concept they have just learned will increase the probability that it will be understood, analyzed, integrated and reapplied in future situations.

3. Teach the child to make better use of their visual-perceptual-organizational skills as they apply to practical and social situations. For example, pictures, videos, and other non-verbal representations of social situations could be presented and they would be asked to discuss their perception of the situation and how one might best respond. Providing the child with strategies for deciphering the most salient dimensions of these non-verbal communication forms would allow them to develop their repertoire of body language and other non-verbal communication “cues”.

Consistency of approach between school, outside support, and home would be the ideal way to help the child feel secure and in control of situations. Sensitivity to his/her non-verbal weakness and his/her need to increase the precision and communicability of their language skills must be acknowledged and addressed in all learning and social spheres.

In addition to social communication, reading comprehension, and writing support, the child’s poor self esteem and depressive feelings need to be addressed by a skilled psychotherapist. While cognitive/academic assistance, as outlined above, will undoubtedly improve his/her feelings of self-efficacy, the psychological turmoil is too severe not to be treated as a concern in it’s own right. Rather, joint efforts between the language therapist and psychotherapist would allow for maximal effectiveness of both treatment modalities.

November 11, 2002