Innovation in Language Learning

The past decade has seen increasingly rapid number of young people with a diagnosis of an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) coming into Foreign language classes. Autistic learners have several areas of difficulties including, impairment in social interaction, unusual social communication and lack of flexibility. this paper seeks to examine the effect of visual prompts and input enhancement on increasing level of flexibility among Iranian autistic EFL learners. in order to conduct the study, a sample of sixty participants, aged from 10 to 14, were recruited randomly from three autistic institutions in Isfahan, Iran. They were divided into three groups: (a) control group: they received nor visual prompts nor input enhancement, (b) Input enhancement group: they received an enhanced input by bolding target vocabularies, and (c) Visual prompts group: they received target vocabularies through visual prompts including pictures and drawing illustrations. after treatment, two tasks including, a fill-in-the-blank-recall task and controlled oral translation were prepared to analyze autistic learners’ vocabulary retention. Repeated measure ANOVA was used to assess efficacy of each method. the obtained result indicated a clear benefit of using visual prompts in increasing flexibility that is needed to acquire target words.