Repeating purposefully: Empowering educators with functional communication models of echolalia in Autism.

Research into echolalia did not originally emanate from the field of education; however, anecdotes from classroom educators were cited as the primary impetus for the creation of some of the communicatively functional models. We found that although there are many techniques that researchers have used to attribute a communicative function to echolalia, some of these can be easily employed by educators in their practice. By adopting these techniques, educators are placed in a position that may assist with the identification of communicative echolalia; subsequently they are better placed to acknowledge and respond to their students.