Tag Archives: reading comprehension

Textual clues to emotion will help with inflection

To get a student with autism to read with inflection, especially the younger ones, perhaps we need to TELL them what the emotion of the speaker is.

Inference Cuing: What is the most likely reason for that?

What can we infer is the reason for this character’s behavior? Readers with autism may need to be prompted to focus their thinking on what is most common and most likely under the circumstances of the story.

* What are the most common reasons why someone would do that?

* What is the most likely reason this character is doing that, considering what just happened to her?

What were they thinking? Teach vocabulary!

Those of us attempting to help struggling readers on the spectrum to comprehend what they read in narrative, in text, are limited by the breadth of the child’s working vocabulary. Anything we can do to expand that working vocabulary pushes us closer to a grade-appropriate level of reading comprehension.

FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension

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 problem of the read-aloud

By Sara Finegan One of the most frequent questions I get, from special education and general education teachers alike, is how to deal with the fact that their students with autism do not pay attention during story time.  Readers with autism are generally not good listeners and often will not only fail to attend to [...]

So he resists reading: What does he like?

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?

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

  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 [...]

Anaphoric cuing: Asking clarifying questions

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.