Exploring Parents’ Training Courses and Parents’ Applied Ways in Enhancing Autistic Children’s Lexical Knowledge

Parents’ Training Courses (PTCs) and Parents’ Applied Ways (PAWs) assist Autistic Children’s (ACs’) parents to apply a more productive method for fostering their children s language ability and alleviating their severities. This study aimed at investigating the existence of PTCs and PAWs and their effects on Iranian ACs’ vocabulary learning and language improvement. To gather the information of the improvement in ACs’ vocabulary knowledge as a result of PTCs and PAWs, a semi-structured interview was administrered to ACs’ parents. To assess their answers, MAXQDA11 and SPSS Statistics 25 softwares were used. It was revealed that the ACs’ parents had passed no PTCs, yet they had found some useful PAWs to teach vocabulary and communication to their children and based on their self-assertion, ACs’ have shown lexical improvement in almost 85% of cases. The findings point at the pivotal role of parents in assisting ACs to develop their linguistic abilities and call for initiatives from stakeholdres to fill the existant gap by planning PTCs for Iranian ACs’ parents.

Keywords:

Autism Spectrum Disorders , Parents’ Training Courses , Parents’ Applied Ways , vocabulary learning