readerswithautism.com

By Sara Finegan

Sam, a sixth-grader, didn’t like to read anything except picture books. His independent reading level was at the fourth grade for non-fiction (he loved science and nature text) and at the low third grade in fiction. The more I conferred with him about his reading, the more it became clear that Sam’s relationship with text was purely passive: whatever meaning came to him came to him, and he made no effort to interact with the text in any way.

Questioning for meaning

Good readers have a relationship with the written word. As we read, we perform a variety of tasks simultaneously, including making inferences, predictions, visualizing, and questioning for meaning.  All of these are forms of interactions between our minds and the text. Sam did none of these, and relied purely on words he recognized and the book’s illustrations to bring him any understanding of what the author wanted him to know.

We know that writers have a purpose, and that the purpose generally involves what it is that the author wants us as the reader to think about. Many readers with autism have no concept of why a writer writes, or that readers are supposed to be thinking at all when they read. When I asked Sam what he thought I did when I was reading, he said “look at the words.” I asked if he thought I did anything else. “Look at the pictures?” he said.  Anything else? “No?”

Right here is when I made a mistake that took several days to undo.  Do not, I repeat, do NOT repeat this at home:

“What do you think I think about when I’m reading?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I think about what the author is telling me.”

“The author isn’t talking,” said Sam, very reasonably and with a bit of concern that I might perhaps be delusional.

“Oh, but she is,” I said. “She is talking in writing. The words she’s writing are her way of talking to us as readers.”

This did not go over well with Sam.  Like all readers with autism, he is a concrete thinker and takes everything absolutely literally.  Since he could not hear or see the author, the idea that she might be talking to him freaked him out.  He began looking for the author and trying to hear her, and worrying that she might not be very nice, and doing all sorts of other mental gyrations that led to a great deal of anxiety on his part.

What to do?

I backtracked.  For several days, we read picture books and did not talk about reading or what authors do.  In the meantime, I racked my brains to figure out how to convey the idea to Sam that he should be doing something in his head while he read.

As usually happens, I woke up at 2:30 a.m. one weeknight with an idea.  It took awhile to sort my thinking out, mostly because my thoughts were careening between “damnit, I have to be up at 4:45 and WHY am I waking up at the crack of 2:30?” and “here’s the deal about relating to text.” Also, Boaz the Siamese cat heard me open my eyes (they are too psychic) and started making pitiful “we are all dying of starvation, please feed us” noises, which contributed nothing to the event.

But here’s what I ultimately came up with:  Sam did not need to understand that he had to interact with the text in order to make meaning of it.  Sam just needed to interact with the text.  And not only that, but he needed to be taught a strategy that would enable him to interact regularly with the text and make meaning from it.  A strategy, I decided at 3:25, that would enable him to have an internal dialogue with the text and also be able to summarize what he was reading.

I would like to tell you that during the next few days, I developed a strategy to teach Sam how to do all that, and that from then on, he was an interactive, thoughtful reader. Unfortunately, it took several years, during which time Sam moved on to other teachers, for me to find a really good way to accomplish the objectives I set.

Say What?

For several years, I was lucky enough to teach with a Speech Language Pathologist, Cindy Hale, who not only was interested in language as it relates to reading and writing, but wanted to work in the classroom with kids on comprehension tasks.  A couple of years ago, she introduced a reading activity that has colored the world of reading in my classroom.  I call it Say What? and it was based on the concept of Storytalk that we’d been using with Cindy to help us write personal narratives.  (I’ll write about Storytalk another time).

Question and summarize

We used Charlotte’s Web, but you can use any chapter book at any level with kids in this activity.  The idea is to teach kids to question as they read and then to pause and summarize what they’ve been reading.  We do it in writing to begin with, as a group, and please bear in mind that it takes a long, long period of interactive work, with a gradual release of responsibility from adult to student, before kids begin to be able to do the work independently.  Despite this, the work almost immediately begins to influence their reading, and they love it.

You will need a copy of the text for each student or a document camera with overhead so that everyone can see the text on a screen.  If you are working with a group, you will need an easel pad; if you are a parent working with your child, then either an easel pad or lined paper will work.

Draw a line down the center of your paper.  I like to use two colors of pen or marker, one for each side.  The title of the left column of the paper is “What we know.”  The title of the right column is “Questions we have.”

Here’s how it works:  You will read aloud, paragraph by paragraph, while the kids follow along. Pause every paragraph (if it’s a long paragraph, you can stop in the middle) to ask kids to contribute questions they have about what is going on.  Write the questions in the right column. Ask the kids to let everyone know if they think a question has been answered as you continue reading.

A tip about asking questions:

Concrete thinkers like readers with autism are going to have to learn how to ask deeper questions as opposed to ones which are easily answered in the text.  We do not want kids asking what color Fern’s hair was if it has nothing to do with why her father was carrying an axe to the barn.  We want kids to develop questions about what is going on that will help them to understand the plot and the characters.

This is easier said than done.  One of the best ways to support kids in asking meaningful questions is to emphasize the great questions that they ask and minimize the weaker ones.  Thus, Cindy and I would give a little shrug and a one or two word response if a student asked a trivial question.  When a student asked a deeper, meatier question, we’d stop, nod at the student, and say something like “Wow, now that is a great question.  I like the way you asked that!  Let’s write that one down.  Wow, that is a good one.”  Within a week or so, the questions uniformly became much better in our reading groups.

If a child needs help phrasing a question, either grammatically or because you think he or she is having trouble coming up with the right words, don’t hesitate to intervene and ask the question, then have the student repeat it correctly.

Even if you are teacher who does not normally encourage interruptions, you are going to want the kids to be raising their hands and shouting out when they hear/read an answer to one of the posted questions.  This is important.  We want the kids to experience what it’s like to not only ask questions as they read, but to recognize when a question is answered and celebrate it.  This type of active listening/ reading is crucial to developing an independent interaction with the text.  Don’t stifle it.

Every few paragraphs, or whenever there’s a natural pause or change in the plot (change of scene, end of dialogue, mood shift), stop and ask the kids to help you summarize what has happened so far.  You’re going to do this as an interactive writing task in the left column.  Give the kids sentence starters and have them do most of the summarizing.  Intervene if you need to to make sure that the summary goes in proper sequence of events.  Pause and ask the kids for good vocabulary words to use.  Try to use new words  you’ve read and defined in the text, and avoid passive verbs and vague or generic nouns.  Once you’ve finished a passage summary, it should be read out loud.

Tip: if you have any good artists in your group of readers, you can assign one of them at a time to draw some illustrations of what you’re reading.  I like to draw the kids illustration boxes (like in a comic strip) so that they can make small pictures of the entire series of events as we read.  Share out and display!

What I like about this reading activity is that it introduces kids to several concepts at once: asking questions of the text, identifying and using the answers, and summarizing. Because we are also using a chapter book and taking a long time to finish the entire story, we are introducing to the kids another important concept: connecting what we’ve read earlier to what we’re reading now. This is important.

Making connections

One of the things that readers with autism do not tend to do is to make links between what they read in the same text earlier in time with what they are reading in the present. Thus, if they read a bit yesterday of The Schoolmouse they will not connect the information gleaned to what they read tomorrow.  Separate events equals separate information, in their minds.  Furthermore, they often have difficulty connecting previously read sections of a book even if they just read them 5 minutes ago.  To a reader with autism, individual chapters of a book may not be perceived as being related to one another!

By working with kids on questioning and summarizing in a single text on a long-term basis, they learn very quickly that all parts of a novel are related. They see how we will pause to summarize and reflect when we pick up a book again after a break, and how we may stop at the end of a chapter before moving on in order to reflect on where the plot is going or what is happening to a favorite character.

We use the questioning/summarizing technique off and on in my classroom these days. We’ve used it in smaller texts, such as short stories, when we’ve read them slowly over a period of days, and in long, long texts, like Boy of Painted Cave, which took us weeks to complete.  In all cases, the kids’ comprehension of what was going on in the plot, and their ability to start thinking more deeply than the literal facts is invariably enhanced.  Give it a try!