FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension

By readers1  |  2009/12/20 09:05 Posted in Anaphoric cuing  |  Comments (0)

 

Q: Is it “anaphoric cuing” or “anaphoric cueing”?
A: Yes. 

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Q: What are anaphora?
A: Anaphora are words, often pronouns, which refer back to reference words previously used in the text. For example: “Dan opened his book, put his head down on it, and fell asleep.” In this case, “his” and “it” are the anaphora and “Dan” and “book”  are the reference words.

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Q: What, briefly, is anaphoric cuing?
A: Anaphoric cuing involves teaching the child to identify the anaphora and to pause to relate them to their reference words while reading. In this way, the student begins 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.

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Q: Who first identified anaphoric cuing as an effective intervention for teaching reading comprehension to children on the autism spectrum?
A: Researchers Irene O’Connor and Perry Klein, both of the University of Western Ontario (Canada),worked with 20 adolescent students with hyperlexia to explore the success of cloze questions, pre-reading questions, and anaphoric cuing. They found anaphoric cuing to be the most effective teaching strategy for improving reading comprehension with these students.
         [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]

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Q: What is meant by hyperlexia?
A: 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. Many children on the autism spectrum have this difficulty, even though they may not be diagnosed with hyperlexia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia )

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Q: Has O’Connor and Klein’s study been “proven” in the classroom?
A: This blog’s primary author, Sara Finegan, has had success with the technique (http://readerswithautism.com/2009/09/autism-and-hyperlexia-part-1-anaphoric-cuing/ and http://readerswithautism.com/2009/09/autism-and-hyperlexia-part-2-helping-bobby-read/ ) and would like to hear from other teachers or parents about their experience with anaphoric cuing or any other teaching strategy that has worked to improve reading comprehension by students on the autism spectrum.

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Q: How did Sara learn to do this?
A: As her first posts show, Sara and her student, Bobby, worked it out for themselves.  The process is not complicated. Paraeducators (paraprofessionals, classroom aides) can help to implement it. (http://readerswithautism.com/2009/12/anaphoric-cuing-asking-clarifying-questions/ and http://readerswithautism.com/2009/09/role-of-the-classroom-aide-to-help-the-child-toward-independence/ )

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Q: Does the technique work with students trying to improve reading comprehension in another language besides English?
A: We don’t know for sure, but would assume that in any language that uses pronouns or other anaphora regularly in text, large numbers of children on the autism spectrum have difficulty with comprehension. This technique could be tried to see if it helps and PLEASE let us know what your results are.

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Q:  I’m a teacher (or parent) willing to try anaphoric cuing but I have questions.  Can I contact you?

A:  Certainly.  We want you to Post a Comment to any one of our articles, including this one (see below), or you may Contact Us ( http://readerswithautism.com/contact-us/ ) by email.  We will respond to any communication from an educator or a parent trying to help a struggling reader.

 

Our Goal:  Providing help for struggling readers on the autism spectrum.

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Hello, World 2! Leave us a comment and tell us why you visited

By readers1  |  2009/12/14 19:03 Posted in Anaphoric cuing, General  |  Comments (7)

 

Our very first post, on August 15, 2009 (just four months ago), was titled “Hello World!”  At the time, with no one even knowing we existed who wasn’t a blood relative, it seemed a little pretentious.

So no one is as surprised as we are today to notice that in the past 10 days alone we have had visitors to Readers With Autism from:

  • flags_world_countries_mr_lakshman_poonyth_India
  • Sweden (Sara är född i Uppsala)
  • Australia
  • The Philippines
  • Great Britain
  • Malta
  • Panama
  • Israel  (ken, anachnu yehudim, ve Sara makira et ha-aretz tov-tov)
  • Canada
  • and more than a dozen U.S. states

Most of the visitors come looking for information about anaphoric cuing, and we are proud to be in the forefront of websites talking about that strategy, and perhaps the only one showing teachers and parents how to use it to help a struggling reader.

We are happy you found us and we want to help anyone who is attempting to improve the reading comprehension of a child with autism, Asperger Syndrome, or hyperlexia. 

Leave us your comments.  Tell us about your experience teaching a reader with autism?  What has worked for you?  What has not worked for you?  What is your experience with anaphoric cuing?  If you are a student yourself, do you have questions about this technique that our posts haven’t answered? 

We have found this small niche for ourselves in the huge internet and we like it, so let us hear your thoughts about anaphoric cuing.  We’ll be happy to share them with the world.

A matter of full disclosure

By readers1  |  2009/12/10 18:04 Posted in General  |  Comments (0)

Readers With Autism is an Amazon.com affiliate.  When you visit our “aStore” and make a purchase, whether or not it was an item we recommended, we get a percentage, a small commission if you will.

We also participate in Google AdSense and if you choose to click on one of those ads that also gives us a small financial benefit.  After the first couple of weeks of participation that amounted to a whopping $1.68.

light_flashlight_largeAside from these arrangements, we have been compensated in no way (neither in cash nor in kind) by any manufacturer or publisher of any book or product we may have mentioned in this blog.

If we should in the future enter into a financial or other compensatory arrangement with any manufacturer or publisher whose product we endorse and/or advertise, we will disclose that, if and when it happens.

Why do we bother mentioning all this?  Because the Federal Trade Commission, in its wisdom, has instituted regulations to protect you from unscrupulous flacks who will endorse snake oil if someone pays them to do it.  That’s not why we are here or what we are about.  If it was income we craved, we chose an odd profession.

So he resists reading: What does he like?

By readers1  |  2009/12/09 15:11 Posted in Fiction  |  Comments (0)

Few children, even those not on the autism spectrum, will voluntarily read something they aren’t interested in.

When we have students with reading comprehension problems, perhaps with hyperlexia, who have difficulty making meaning of what they read, it helps greatly if they care that they don’t get it.  Do they want to know about these characters and what is happening to them?

The first task of the the teacher and paraeducator in trying to help a struggling reader is to engage him or her in the reading. 

Find something that interests the child.

When your struggling reader with autism is allowed to freely choose a book in the classroom library, what does she choose?

butterfly_17Even “fake readers,”  kids who turn the pages, look at the pictures, and recite from memory passages they’ve heard read aloud, will generally return to the same books, or series of books, or subjects (butterflies, horses, ancient Mesopotamia). 

When they are being read to, by the teacher in a read aloud, or by a parent, is there something particular they like to have read to them? 

This can be a way in for some kids, but often the child with autism has receptive language deficits which make it difficult for him or her to follow a story read aloud.

If they simply don’t (yet) relate to books… 

  • Do they watch animated movies?  Finding Nemo?  Toy Story?  Ice Age?  Shrek?
  • Do they like live action films?  Harry Potter?  Spy Kids?  Spiderman?  High School Musical?
  • Are they crazy about TV shows?  ICarly?  Wizards of Waverly Place?  Suite Life of Zack and Cody? 
  • What about cartoons on cable?  Pokemon?  Scooby-Doo?  Dora the Explorer?

Finding what interests them is a way into their imaginations.  Whatever gets and holds their attention, whatever the medium (TV, film, cartoon) can be used to transfer their interest and attention to text.  Almost anything produced for kids on film or video is also available in some print form or another.  

Knowing what the child cares about allows you to find high-interest fiction tailored just for him or her, and high-interest fiction may be just what it takes to begin engaging that struggling reader and make them care about the story they are reading.

Anaphoric cuing: Asking clarifying questions

By readers1  |  2009/12/01 21:38 Posted in Anaphoric cuing, Hyperlexia  |  Comments (0)

By Richard Finegan

In their book The Mosaic of Thought (1997) Keene and Zimmerman identified six“cueing systems” which they described as the channels or sources through which the brain receives information during reading:

  • jigsaw_green_10grapho-phonic cuing–the identification of letters and
  • lexical or orthographic cuing–the identification of sight words
  • syntactic cuing–the recognition of the form and structure of language
  • schematic cuing–prior knowledge or association
  • pragmatic cuing–the purposes and needs of the reader
  • semantic cuing–the meaning of the text

The authors identify a sample semantic cuing problem:  reading words fluently but experiencing difficulty defining what is meant by a word, sentence, or text. (p. 203)

This is precisely where we often find our kids with autism (and always those with hyperlexia) stuck in their comprehension.  And this is where (with due credit to the study done by O’Connor and Klein, 2004) we find anaphoric cuing (also spelled cueing) as a useful semantic cuing tool to help get them unstuck. 

See Autism and hyperlexia, Part 1, http://readerswithautism.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=256 .

Comprehension problems are not unique to kids on the autism spectrum, and some practical hints on how to use anaphoric cuing can be gleaned from the literature on reading comprehension generally.

As Cris Tovani notes in her book I Read But I Don’t Get It (2000), good readers ask themselves clarifying questions as they read.  Who, what, when, where, and why questions about characters, setting, or events.  (p. 52)  Asking themselves these clarifying questions focuses the reader on meaning, not simply on decoding, word by word.

gold_question_markBut if the child with autism or hyperlexia has lost the meaning of what they’re reading, how do they know what questions to ask themselves? 

There is the beauty of the anaphoric cuing technique.

With a fairly short list of anaphora (words that refer to other words) that can be listed on a bookmark  we can teach them when to stop in their reading and what to ask themselves before they move on.

When we read:

he, she, they, we, I, you

we ask who?

When we read:

hers, his, its, theirs, ours, yours

we ask whose?

When we read:

it, that, this, can, do

we ask what?

When we read:

here, there, come, go

we ask where?

When we read:

then, before, after

we ask when? 

By learning a list of specific words and answering a few related questions, many kids can make significant improvement in their comprehension of text, particularly narrative fiction, which often is the most difficult for a child with autism to comprehend.

Stories they help us write

By readers1  |  2009/11/16 05:41 Posted in Fiction  |  Comments (0)

By Sara Finegan

I’ve written a great deal about the specific interventions I use to help kids learn how to make meaning from text.  Because kids with autism often do not hold on to a story while they read, much of what we must do to support comprehension involves teaching them about how to think while they read.

jigsaw_green_10The other part of the equation that creates comprehension is, of course, the concept of purpose and engagement in the text.  Kids who don’t want to read are not going to understand what they read.  Kids who do not read for a purpose aren’t going to get much out of it.

To that end, I’ve posted about finding books of interest for readers with autism and, more recently, my experiences writing serial stories about my students for them to read.  There’s another technique that works well with younger or more immature readers, and that is writing stories for the kids to complete.

I got the idea when I happened to buy a book about one of my favorite worlds, Pern (author Anne McCaffrey writes sci-fi, which I don’t ordinarily like, but this series has to do with dragons, and I was hooked).  I thought the book was going to be a bunch of short stories about Pern, and it was, but there was a catch.  It was one of those “choose your ending” stories, which I hate, hate, hate.  

There are many such books available for kids, and many children love them.  Readers with autism do not tend to enjoy them, for the simple reason that they don’t feel comfortable using their imaginations in that way.  They are perfectly prepared to enter a world of fantasy, where things exist that don’t exist in the real world; they just aren’t willing to write their own endings. 

I understand that completely.  It occurred, to me, however, that if my readers with autism did like that kind of book, it would be a really great way to get them engaged in a text.  

Several weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about fill-in-the-blank worksheets.  (I hate it, because when I wake up like that with an idea, I’m too sleepy to flail around looking for a pen to write it down with, even if a shred of paper did exist on my bedside table.)   I had no idea why, but as I let my mind drift, the pick-your-own-ending books straggled around the edges of my thoughts.

 In the morning, the idea seemed to gel in my caffeine-loaded brain, and I began to work on a story for one of my students who had trouble staying with a narrative.  His mind would start to wander and he’d start fake-reading about a paragraph into any text.  What I discovered in my new strategy was a way to keep him hooked to the text and striving for meaning all the way through. 

I call this particular intervention the “stories we write together,” even though I do most of the writing and all the reader has to do is fill in a word or two here and there.  The idea is to write a story for your reader about a topic that interests him or her.  Hope that it is a topic for which there are photos or clip art on the web, because you need to illustrate it. 

Every few sentences, leave a word blank.  When your reader comes to that blank space, he will be asked to fill it in with a word.  You can write it, or the student can write it. 

What happens when our readers with autism get a high-interest story like this that requires them to be paying attention so that they can add a word or phrase here and there is that they tend to stay with the story, hang on to what’s happening, and enjoy the interaction they have with the text.

lightbulb_dramaticTIP:  I’m sure you could use stories that already exist – just retype them onto a text document, add illustrations, and insert your own blanks where you think the student will be able to add meaningful words or phrases.  Not all of us love making up stories at the drop of a hat. 

If you do decide to write your own, don’t worry about the quality.  For God’s sake, don’t sweat about character development or setting; the point is to create a narrative that intrigues the child, and believe me, children don’t get wound up over glitches or parts that don’t make as much sense as they could if we spent hours writing the plot.

Here’s an example: “Teddy Meets The Incredible Hulk”.  My original had cool illustrations (Google Image is a teacher’s best friend), and you can easily add them to any such stories you write.

You should enjoy this as much as the reader with autism!