readerswithautism.com

By Sara Finegan

Bobby approached my kidney-shaped conference table hesitantly, walking on tiptoe around the nearby rocking chair.  He was carrying a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  I greeted him; he did not meet my eyes. 

This was the first day of the second week of school, and we had fashioned name tags, written letters for school mail, smelled Jamie’s flatulence several times, learned about Georgia O’Keefe, and made a sheet cake into a replica of the State of California.  Earlier this morning we had chosen our favorite books.  Now I was beginning to conduct some assessments of my new students’ reading abilities.

 Bobby opened to the first chapter of the book and began to read for me: 

Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.  For one
thing, he hated the summer holidays more than any other time
of year.  For another, he really wanted to do his homework, but
was forced to do it in secret, in the dead of night.  And he also
happened to be a wizard.

Bobby read quickly and smoothly and made no errors.  I raised my eyebrows as he continued, his tongue tripping over the words and his eyes fixated on the page.  This was a reader.  This was a fourth grader who could read Harry Potter.   I motioned for him to stop.

 “So,” I said casually, “what is going on with Harry?”

 Bobby looked anxious.  I could almost see his mind turn inwards.  He seemed absorbed in some internal sensory experience that I could not share.  I pulled him back. 

“Bobby?  How is Harry different from other kids?” 

“I don’t know.”  

I did a quiet mental double-take. 

“Can you find it in the text?”

 He scanned the first page.  Shook his head.  Bobby did not understand a word he had just read.   No matter what I asked, how I prompted, or where I pointed in the text, he made no meaning at all of the words. 

I sent him back to his seat with a Dumb Bunny book.  I sat back and watched him turn the pages, laughing vaguely and pointing at the words.

»  »  ¤  «  «

 Bobby was my first student with autism.  I had just changed the focus of my work in San Diego from a middle school ED class (which stood for “emotionally disturbed” though that was rarely spoken) to a mild-moderate Special Day Class for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. 

On the first day of that school year I met Bobby, who was moving to the upper level SDC class after two years in the lower grades at my new school.  He was compliant, wanted to please, and was completely accepted by his classmates.

The results of that first reading conference were confirmed when I administered the Analytical Reading Inventory (ARI): Bobby could decode at the ninth grade level.  His comprehension was at the primer level. 

A review of his Language Arts standardized testing results for the previous year revealed that he consistently scored “Far Below Basic” on the CAT-6 test each spring.  In October, the kids took the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) test, which consists of a series of cloze exercises.  Bobby scored, once again, Far Below grade level.

Hyperlexia

Bobby has hyperlexia, which is a precocious ability to decode words in text with next to no understanding of what they mean. 

Children with autism tend to share some common learning characteristics, not the least of which is deficits in reading.  Within the realm of reading comprehension, they generally exhibit difficulties making sense of complex sentences, struggle with figurative language, make few inferences or in any way access their background knowledge, and connect to fiction text in minimal fashion. 

When a child with autism decodes at a high level but has considerable comprehension deficits, she or he cannot learn strategies for inferring, integrating text, or making personal connections to text unless the hyperlexia is first confronted.

 This blog post is the story of my next two years with Bobby, and why, as he completed the fifth grade, all standardized and authentic assessments confirmed his ability to both decode and comprehend at grade level or higher. 

So what could I do to help?

Bobby not only introduced me to hyperlexia, but bore with me when I discovered that there was but one professional journal article which provided a hint about a potentially-significant intervention for this particular reading disability.  By necessity, we were forced to follow up on it in our own way, on our own.
 
 The first hundred or more times I attempted to locate information on interventions that work in cases of hyperlexia I drew a complete blank.  Most of the professional literature pertaining to hyperlexia has to do with defining it and describing it.  There are very few articles that describe how to fix it.

I didn’t particularly care why Bobby had hyperlexia, or how it manifested; I wanted to know what to do about it to help him make meaning when he read. 

I became increasingly frustrated in my research, which was my first entrée into investigating teaching strategies for working with kids with autism.  Plenty of people wanted to describe their child’s hyperlexia.  Plenty of researchers wanted to discuss whether it was a part of autism or a part of language disorders.  Nobody really had any useful ideas about how to handle it in the classroom.

Success!  Sort of…

 Finally, late one night while I was on vacation in New York, I did one last, desperate Google™ search.   And up popped an abstract of an article describing a test of three different interventions: pre-questioning strategies, cloze exercises, and something called “anaphoric cuing.”  Only the last intervention showed success in improving reading comprehension. 

[O’Connor, I.M. & Klein, P.D. (2004).  Exploration of strategies for facilitating the reading comprehension of high-functioning students with autism spectrum disorders.  Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(2):  115 -127]

Ahah!  But what is anaphoric cuing and how did the researchers use it? 

By yet another bit of poor luck, I was unable to obtain a good copy of the article for several months.  Lacking patience, I decided to go ahead and try to figure out what anaphoric cuing was on my own.  The first thing I had to do was locate the definitions of all of those big words.  I learned the following from a variety of sources:

Definitions

• Hyperlexia is a reading disorder characterized by a precocious ability to decode words, usually two or more levels above the child’s age or grade, combined with significantly impaired comprehension of the same words.
• Anaphora are words, often pronouns, which refer back to reference words previously used in the text.  For example: “Dan went to his locker to retrieve his jacket.”  In this case, “his” is the anaphora and “Dan” is the reference word.
• Anaphoric cuing involves teaching the child to identify anaphora and to pause to relate them to their reference words while reading.  In this way, the child begins to understand text as an integration of phrases and to connect the parts of the text to one another.  The active engagement required to relate words to one another supports the child’s connection to the text and reduces his or her habit of passive decoding.

O’Connor and Klein’s study 

Eventually I obtained their article and learned that Irene O’Connor and Perry Klein, both of the University of Western Ontario, had worked with 20 adolescent students with hyperlexia to explore the success of cloze questions, pre-reading questions, and anaphoric cuing. 

While instruction using the first two techniques had little impact on the quality of reading comprehension, anaphoric cuing resulted in significant improvements.

O’Connor and Klein suggested that students with hyperlexia do not understand that anaphora refer back in the text and the researchers theorized that if such students could be coached to stop and identify the reference made by the anaphora, reading comprehension would improve.

They selected several texts in which 12 anaphora were underlined, and underneath each one provided three choices as to the reference word.  Students were encouraged to pause at each underlined word and choose the correct reference word. 

The students demonstrated the ability to pause and consider each underlined anaphora accurately, choosing the correct reference word 5 of 6 times.  In addition, their ability to answer comprehension questions following the session of anaphoric cuing was demonstrably improved.

But in the winter of Bobby’s fourth grade year, with only an educated guess of what “anaphoric cuing” must involve, I began to work with him.  What exactly did I do?

That will be the subject of my next post.