Presented by: Christine Besnard
Date:  Thursday, October 23, 2008
Time: 12:40pm- 1:20pm
Session: Lunch Time Session

Outline of Presentation

This presentation will seek to answer questions often asked by professionals, families and language teachers about the learning of foreign languages (L2) by Asperger Syndrome and high functioning ASD children.

Today, families of Asperger Syndrome and high functioning ASD children are still advised by professionals (speech-pathologists, doctors, educators) to limit their children to the learning of one language, namely the language spoken in their communities. What these professionals do not seem to realize is the dramatic impact (social, psychological, familial) such advice has on the many families around the world who live in multilingual and multicultural countries like Canada.
We therefore argue that they should encourage Asperger Syndrome and high functioning autistic children who want to learn a second language to do so as such learning can lead to beneficial effects on their overall development.

Recent psycholinguistic research done on L2 learning by children with Learning Disabilities, with language disorders like Dyslexia, with Down Syndrome, and by high functioning ASD children show that such learning benefits these children, does not hinder their development, and even has a beneficial effect on their command of L1.
Because over the years, a number of well known psycholinguists have shown the positive outcomes of L2 learning on the regular population, we believe that the same arguments can apply to the Asperger Syndrome and the high functioning autistic children, and that the benefits are not only linguistic but also cognitive, social, cultural and psychological.

For the language teachers, we will talk about the strengths of the ASD language learners they can capitalize on. We will also talk about the most appropriate features of a number of conventional and non-conventional methodologies they can use in the language classroom in order to maximize L2 learning by these particular learners.
Finally, we will outline the ultimate teaching strategies the good language teachers can use in order to help the high functioning ASD students learn L2.

To conclude, we argue that L2 learning offers the high functioning ASD children a second chance to learn to communicate more efficiently in their L2, and also in their L1.
In fact, for all the above reasons we strongly believe that L2 learning by high functioning ASD children should be a right and should be encouraged especially in bilingual families and communities.