Milieu Teaching and Autism Ranking:

The aim of milieu teaching is to increase and improve a range of communication skills. For example according to Goldstein (2002),

“a variety of communicative functions are being taught to children with autism using milieu teaching procedures: preverbal communication (eye contact, joint attention, and motor imitation); spontaneous productions of 'I like/love you', descriptions of drawings and car play; social amenities such as ‘please, thank you, excuse me, you’re welcome, hello'; positive interactions with peers; answers to ‘Where is ___?’ questions; phoneme [unit of sound] production; and simply increased talking.”

There have been various claims made for milieu teaching used with young autistic children including improved communication. For example

Hancock and Kaiser (2002) reported that “all children showed positive increases for specific target language use at the end of 24 intervention sessions, and these results were maintained through the 6-month follow-up observations.”
Kaiser et al (2000) reported “Most children’s complexity and diversity of productive language increased.”
Mancil et al (2009) reported “Results indicate that aberrant behavior decreased concurrent with an increase in total percentage of communication responses (PCR). The children maintained communication and low rates of aberrant behavior, and generalized their communication from the home to the classroom.“
Olive et al. (2007) reported that children learned to request items during play.

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