Specialist Teaching Service
Autism
Outreach Team
Social Scripts:
People
with autism may have difficulty understanding situations because of:
- An
inability to read the verbal and non-verbal behaviour of other people means that those with autism have
only a limited access to accurate social information.
- A lack of understanding of
what information is important.
- A lack of information seeking skills and an inability
to realise that questions can be used to gain information from others.
- A lack of
intuition about what the behaviour of others tells you about their feelings, thoughts and intentions.
Carol Gray (Gray 1993) developed a way of explaining social situations
in a clear, visual way that can be returned to again and again. By setting the explicit rules and expectations
of a particular situation down as a script, we can make it clear to a person with autism exactly how
he or she is expected to behave.
At the same time, they withdraw the difficult
social dimension or 'emotional context' of one person explaining inappropriate behaviour to another.
Objectives
for social scripts:
- Facilitate mainstream inclusion
- Teach social skills
- Limit ritualistic
or repetitive behaviour
- Help cope with change and teach new
routines
- Explain people's behaviour
- Reduce
challenging behaviour
Writing a social
script:
The
story should contain:
Descriptive sentences
Directive sentences
Perspective sentences.
The story must be accurate. Avoid using
words such as will. Use might or may instead. Try to keep the tone positive, i.e., Simon walks, as opposed
to Simon does not run. Also, use as few directive sentences as possible. The balance of 3 or 4 descriptive
sentences to 1 directive one is probably about right, although in some circumstances you might want
to use even fewer.
Here is a short example of a social script about winning
and losing.
On Tuesdays I play games with Mrs. Merry, Thomas
and Jazdeep.
Sometimes we play games that have a winner.
I
like to be the winner very much.
Everybody says "Well Done!" or
something like that when I win.
Mrs. Merry, Thomas and Jazdeep like to win
as well.
I will try to say "Well done!" when they win.
Everybody
will be happy and I might win next time.
References:
Gray,
C. (1993) Social Stories: Improving responses of children with autism with accurate social information.
Focus on Autistic Behaviour 8, pp1-10
George Thomas
Professional
Leader
Autism Outreach Team
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