Reading Comprehension Tips

Having Autism does not justify one to be necessarily far behind the learning curve of normal children. Accepting the thorough and deeper comprehension skills will actually help aid with ASD children learning and giving them the same chance to obtain a skill level of someone in the same grade. Children with ASD lack Theory of Mind, Central Coherence, and lower Executive functioning.


The Theory of Mind plays a part in being able to grasp the point of view of what they have read and or the general perspective of one another. This deficiency stems from not being able to fully understand the idea of others having their own input and opinions. Having ASD, one will lack the grasp of understanding certain situations from others' perspectives and even the inability to predict behavior through contexts they indulge in reading.

The inability of central coherence relates when autistic students try to bring together a whole ideal or concept from prior readings. Central coherence prevents these students from grouping together major themes of a story and or even grouping together selective genres.
And last but not least, Executive functioning plays a role alongside ASD by causing a lack of organization, planning, and monitoring progress during certain situations. EF is the deficits inability to recognize sequencing events within a story, accessing prior knowledge, creating mental images, and summarizing what they have read.
When teaching students with ASD reading comprehension, all these factors must be taken into consideration when planning an effective approach that is thorough and also easy to understand.

A few tips could be set in place to aid in pre-reading activities to fully ensure students are learning and understanding properly.
Pre-reading activities could fall within keyword cards, picture cards, passage prediction, prior knowledge discussions, authentic reading resources, and even power points presented by said students.

These tips help aid in accumulating as much related knowledge before learning more in-depth texts. It is very important to create connections when trying to understand the knowledge given to ensure that students are grasping the main concept as much as possible.
Engaging a student to link text with themselves is highly recommending when forming connections, this can be done by using Graphs, Venn diagrams, and the 3-2-1 chart; which reveals the 3 things discovered, 2 things they found interesting, and one question that remained.


Being able to teach a student how to generate questions will also become a big factor when ensuring they are receiving all potential help when putting two and two together. This teaching can go as far as creating storyboards, where you have a story column and a question column.
The story column will focus on character, setting, event, solution, and problem, whereas the question column points out the who, what, when, where, why, and how.
Introducing these will help aid in recognizing important events, creating mental images, and gaining enough information to put together a story recall, were not all, but the main events are able to be pointed out.

1 comment

  • I love reading the insightful ideas on how to teach a child with Autism. My grandson had gotten a late start on launguage skills because of a hearing problem that put him behind development skills. I am using tips and products to help him and catch up before he starts school. He is coming along quite well. Some products take a long time to get here. Again thank you for all that you do in helping parents/grandparents help our most precious gifts.

    Lana Charron

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