Individualized Guidance to Empower an L2 Learner With Autism Spectrum Disorder in Academic Essay Writing

Abstract

The present study was conducted to see the extent to which intensive online individualized guidance sessions could help a second/foreign language (L2) learner of English with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at an undergraduate level to write an academic essay in the education field with citations and references. The sessions, 30 minutes each, were conducted 14 times in total during the second semester of the 2020/2021 academic year. Teaching journal detailing the participant’s learning dynamic in each session, the participant’s ongoing writing progress, and the recorded videos of the sessions were used to assess this learner participant’s learning progress. The study found that through the individualized guidance sessions, the learner participant could write a 326-word academic essay with citations using three journal articles in the Indonesian language as the references. It also found that as the participant became more familiar with the pattern of the sessions and the expectation of what to do in each session, he could do his task faster and more confidently. Based on the findings, several pedagogical implications and possible research contributions are stated along with suggested directions for future studies in the field of autism in the L2 learning context.