Islamic Vocabulary Enrichment for Autistic Children through Visual Support

For children, vocabulary enrichment needs exposure as it is related to several factors including the role of parents to facilitate their increase in both receptive and expressive vocabulary. This paper discusses language of autistic children and the use of visual support to facilitate vocabulary enrichment related to Islamic terms. It explores the visual support used by teachers of a primary school for special need students in Malang, Indonesia. The finding shows that teachers employed several types of visual support used as teaching media during both one-on-one learning and class interaction with the purpose of vocabulary enrichment. One of the set of vocabularies students need to acquire is religion related terms that in this paper concerns with Islamic vocabulary, some of which are loan words from Arabic language. Therefore, acquiring Islamic vocabulary is not always easy especially when it is introduced to children with special need or those with specific language impairment. Some suggested techniques are also given when implementing visual support to introduce Islamic vocabulary to students with special needs.