readerswithautism.com » purpose

Fiction with a purpose (but one at a time)

readers1 — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:15:09 +0000

By Sara Finegan

You might have noticed that most (but not all) readers with autism prefer non-fiction to fiction.

With the exception of Bobby, all of my students on the spectrum have gravitated toward the fact-based section of our classroom library.

Many of them become mini-encyclopedias themselves as they develop particular areas of expertise due to their highly-focussed interests. They’ll read the same books over and over (and over) again. They’ll re-read the same pages on a regular basis.

They don’t seem to have a whole lot of difficulty understanding expository text. I think I know why.

Why is non-fiction easier to understand?

First, expository text tends to have primarily literal significance. The writing is clear and straightforward, organized and efficient. There aren’t a lot of critical thinking requirements. There are just facts.

To be sure, someone who really wants to have a deep knowledge of a given topic needs to be able to connect, analyze, evaluate and synthesize the facts, and someone on the autism spectrum may not be able to do so very easily. But it is not required.

Secondly, the text doesn’t contain a lot of the features that someone with autism might find difficult. There is very little figurative language, not much in the way of emotions, and there aren’t usually characters one needs to think about in any way other than as actors in a scene. No inferences need to be made, no empathy is necessary.

The text does, however, have certain features that I think have great meaning for a reader with autism:

The text is organized into sections in most of our non-fiction library books.
The chapters don’t go on and on.
There are independent passages separated by photos, topic headings, captions, etc.
One can read just a short piece of the text and get information, make meaning.
Reading stamina doesn’t have to be too great to perform meaningful reading tasks.

And then there’s the fact that the relationship between the reader and the text is much easier than with fiction. The reader can ask questions and get them answered without too much probing. The reader’s job is just to collect information, gather facts, and store them. This is something that many readers with autism are quite good at, and particularly enjoy.

A feeling of competence ensues when a reader with autism can navigate through this kind of text without much difficulty.

What I like about my readers with autism and their relationship to expository text is that it shows me that they very clearly understand about reading with purpose.

Having a purpose for reading is essential to comprehension.

When we read a book about Ancient Egypt, or about shellfish, we have a purpose, which is to learn about how people lived back then, or the different kinds of sea creatures that live on the ocean floor. The text is replete with facts and we know that our job is to collect them. We know, in other words, what we’re looking for. We know what questions we want answered.

It’s not that easy with fiction…

…which is why kids with autism often don’t know how to relate to that kind of text. It’s not immediately obvious what they’re supposed to be looking for, and even if they have an idea, the finding part often requires deeper thinking or more steps.

Inferring might be necessary (which is completely alien to most readers with autism) or comparing one character’s motives to another. If I wasn’t good at making inferences, or if I didn’t know why I was supposed to be reading a novel, I wouldn’t want to read fiction either.

My question is always: How do I harness the skills this reader obviously has when it comes to non-fiction and help her to use it with fiction?

The first thing is to give the reader a purpose. A job, if you will, to do while she’s reading. Something she knows how to do, not something that is alien and uncomfortable. Like…

identifying all of the parts of the setting, or
making a graphic organizer about the relationships between characters, or
physical decriptions of the people in a story.

These are all parts of the story that the reader is probably going to be able to understand without having to do too much work, and since they are all about outward manifestations or connections between people, they call for literal understanding, not in-depth thinking, which we are not going to be working on just yet.

One reading “purpose” at a time

I assign the child only one type of thing to be looking for; no multi-tasking is involved.

TIP: At this point in the reader’s exploration of fiction with purpose, I am not going to give her a long story or a chapter book. In the first exercises of this nature, with these kinds of purposes, I am going to provide her with a short, one-page story with as many familiar text features as possible, including topic headings and maybe a picture or two with a caption. If this means that I need to retype a page to insert headings, I am willing to do that.

The goal is to make the fiction text look as much like non-fiction as possible from a superficial level – it’s reassuring and familiar, and eliminates a lot of anxiety for my reader.

The assignment is quick and dirty, and I expect my reader to come back to me or the classroom aide with a report fairly soon. With any luck, the child will have located the information I asked for, and can repeat it back.

Are we going to try to engage in a long conversation about it? Absolutely not. If this is a child who avoids fiction like the plague, what I am going to do is heap the praise, repeat the information back, and have the child do some sort of quick exercise with me to cement the experience. This might be dictating to me a series of key words found in the text, or doing a quick entry into a graphic organizer. Five minutes.

And then the child is sent off to do something she loves, which might be going back to the same old book about shellfish, or bouncing on a ball. Something pleasurable.

Same text, different purpose

The next time we approach the fiction work, we’re going to use the same text. But now we’re going to assign a different purpose. If the student collected data about the setting during the last read-through, now I’m going to ask her to find out what the characters look like.

Once again, the child is being given a specific purpose to find readily-located information in the fiction passage. And once again, the reporting back is going to be quick, followed by a quick recording activity and a lot of praise.

“How cool! You’re reading a fiction story! And you understand it, don’t you! I’m so proud of you. Now go take a play break.”

I may have the child read the fiction passage 3 or 4 times, each time with a different purpose. I want her to become relaxed with the text, and to experience success in making meaning of what the story is telling.

Lots of practice, short pieces

A reader with autism who is just beginning to experience success in comprehending parts of fiction stories is going to need a lot of practice with short pieces. I try to have a selection available at the child’s independent reading level or a little lower than that, even, so that we can pick and choose several to work on over a two to three week period.

I’ll write about the next steps in another week or two.

Say what? Asking questions as one reads

readers1 — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:52:44 +0000

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!