فاعلية العلاج النفسي الحركي في تحسين مهارات التواصل اللفظي لدى أطفال التوحد
This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of psychomotor therapy in improving the verbal communication skills among children with Autism. The study sample contained of 6 children, 4 males and 2 females, who diagnosed as classic Autism, their ages ranged between 4 and 8 years old. For the purpose of this study the researcher made a measurement to estimate the verbal communication among Autistic children, contained of 37 sentence. Then the researcher made a psychometric study to find validity’s and reliability’s indications of this measurement to make sure that it is reliable to use in this study. This study also used social interaction estimation measurement to estimate how the program effects on social interaction among the children of study sample. The researcher designed a training program based on psychomotor techniques (playing and music), to improve verbal communication sills among Autistic children. The program contained of 20 sessions, the application of the program took two months and 20 days, (2- 3) sessions a week, each session (from 30 to 35) minutes. The researcher applied the pre-measurement and post-measurement on the study participants, and made the comparisons to reveal of training program’s effectiveness in improving the verbal communication skills among study participants, and the effectiveness of this improving on their social interaction skills. Also a postponed measurement has been applied to reveal how the effectiveness of training survives. When researcher finished applying the program, pre-, post- and postponed measurements, and the results was analyzed by (Wilcoxon) and (One-Way Anova) tests to investigate the study hypotheses. The results indicated that the training program is effective in improving the verbal communication and social interaction skills among study participants five weeks after the end of applying the training program, using pre-, post- and postponed measurements. The study proposes in the light of its results that it is necessary to prepare training programs to improve verbal communication and social interaction skills among children with Autism, and working on raising the awareness of psychomotor therapy’s importance and its active role in treatment and qualifying children with Autism in different fields, especially between those who working with Autistic children, like (their teachers, special education specialists and speech language pathologists), and the need for early intervention to develop verbal communication and social interaction skills among Autistic children, to merge them with normal children’s schools in future. (Author’s abstract)