Benchmarking Asperger’s Syndrome Students’ Listening and Speaking Abilities through Social Stories

Abstract

Asperger's syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by a massive number of significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication. This can be clearly seen among children with Asperger’s syndrome who experience difficulties with listening and speaking. As such, communication takes place with restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests. They tend to struggle in giving opinions or as simple as telling stories. Asperger's syndrome became part of the autism spectrum disorder under the autism diagnostic criteria. It is crucial to help the children with Asperger’s syndrome by introducing social stories and creating new activities which are related to their everyday activities that focus on listening and speaking skills. Social stories are significant in terms of their storyline that is related to them. Therefore, the study is to benchmark Asperger's syndrome students' listening and speaking abilities through social stories. It focuses on the usage of social stories among children with Asperger's syndrome. The objectives of the study were to identify and discuss the utterances among Asperger's syndrome children. The samples of the study consist of six students at one of the local schools in Selangor, Malaysia. A social story entitled "Alim" was recited for twenty minutes a day for two weeks. After two weeks, the students were asked about the activity that they had the day before. The results of the study showed that all six students understood the story, and they seemed to imitate or follow the action from the story. It can be seen that the students were happy to help in the house and socialise with their parents and siblings. The results revealed that social story helps Asperger children to grasp a better understanding of their behaviour in their own family and will hopefully be used among their friends at school. This study will help them in their future social life. It is hoped that further studies will focus on social stories relating to folklore to enhance the Asperger children learning in the classroom.