Spelling With A Non-Speaker Who Has Never Spelled
This is obviously beyond the scope of this website about spelling with me, but since I long for the day when every non- or minimally-speaking person can build and share their thoughts, I want to offer some observations from my experience.
You can certainly start to reach out to a non-speller by asking a question and writing two possible answers on torn pieces of paper the way I describe in Lesson One. Ask something from a universe of discourse that the person usually doesn’t get to participate in, like the line of work of a parent. Don’t dumb down the questions. By the time I learned to spell at age 12, I had been through first grade 6 times and I was ready for a new horizon. Therefore I suggest introducing them to the practice of answering questions of a sort they’re not used to; don’t waste the effort on familiar food choices and similar things.
Be absolutely confident that they can do it. They have likely lived for years surrounded by people who are sure they can’t participate in normal discourse, and have probably come to believe it.
You can follow the same four lessons on this site, but there are a couple of things to watch out for. In my case, I did not have a fully-developed mind that simply lacked the means to express itself. Making language by answering questions is how I built my mind. A person new to spelling may not know right away that the words heard refer to the same things as the words spelled. One good idea is to get the person to spell the word chosen on a torn piece of paper, letter by letter, with you calling out the letters and the word. That way they hear it, they see it, they spell it themselves, and they hear it again. That worked for me. In the video of my first spelling session ever, it’s clear that in the middle of my third word I get it and start hunting for the right letters.
It is supremely tiring to put letters and thoughts in order, so be sympathetic to that, but you and your Speller will both have to learn to expect more from a person with autism, and if you are used to making things easy, that may have to be gently but firmly amended.
All the people with my kind of autism that I know of are very good listeners, so they know a lot of things, but may not know they know them. Ask who, what and why questions about life and the world. They may surprise you with how much they know, or know once they have spelled the answer and thus made it their own. In my case, telling what I already knew felt like learning, as answering the questions moved the knowledge from a part of my memory that felt like it had nothing to do with me to a more active part of my mind. The knowledge that I had been carrying around didn’t feel like it belonged to me until I had answered questions about it.
I, and many others, like to write long, beautiful sentences or express complex ideas very concisely. That’s because spelling is so hard that I don’t want to waste the effort on quotidian speech. If a new speller isn’t getting to think and spell new things, they may give up.
Given the chance, people learn fast. Something I didn’t understand on one day was part of my worldview the next. Keep the intellectual level as high as you can, and enjoy abstract thought. There is a whole mind to awaken. Don’t worry if “Are you hungry?” and “Where does it hurt?” come later.
If your minimally-speaking person with autism doesn’t take to spelling, don’t conclude that they are too intellectually disabled to spell. Try one of the professionals on the links page. Even if you are already spelling, these folks and their disciples are full of best practices and wisdom gained from spelling with hundreds of people, and most of them have gotten many to spell their first sentences; they are worth going to see if you can.