A teaching model in the area of spontaneous communication, undertaken
through practitioner research, with Nick, a nonverbal 5-year-old boy with
autism and severe learning disabilities, is examined. Multipointing, which is
the use of sequences of points, to convey a single complex message during the
same communicative act, was taught in progressively less structured situations
to facilitate the spontaneous use of a variety of semantic relations. High rates
of spontaneous use of multipointing to indicate 'location', 'agent' and 'object'
were seen. Results were discussed in terms of symbolization and motor en
coding difficulties.
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