Autism and Reading Part 1: Lessons to be Learned from Special Kids

Regular readers of this blog know I get lots of questions. I do my best to answer them. Occasionally, I have no idea the answer. If a topic is straightforward, I investigate and usually can craft a response that I hope manages to be both informed and helpful.

Other times, I may decide that a query that puzzles me may not be worth the candle. Not that the topic isn’t important to the questioner. Only that even a terrific answer would hold little value for a wider audience.

And then, there are those times when an interrogative has the three I’s. It’s important, it’s interesting, and it’s something about which I’m ignorant.

That sums up this week’s topic.

Usually, I don’t reveal questioner’s identities. This time I sought her permission to do just that. Despite the query, it’s something that she knows more about than me.

According to Google Books, “Emily Iland, M.A., is an award-winning author, advocate, filmmaker, researcher, and leader in the autism field.” She is also the mother of a son on the autism spectrum – so she knows the topic both professionally and personally.

Early in my career I worked with severely autistic preschoolers, my university center operated the autism clearinghouse for the city of Chicago, and I have a family member on the spectrum, also. Nevertheless, my knowledge of the intersection of reading comprehension and autism could best be characterized (if it merits characterization at all) as non-existent.

The reason for Ms. Iland’s question was that she is in the process of revising her book, Drawing A Blank: Improving Comprehension for Readers on the Autism Spectrum (2011).

I gave the literature a quick once over, responded to her with a brief summation of what stood out to me along with a list of studies, and thought that was it. She responded with more than a thank you. She offered a valuable earful that I found fascinating. It made me want to look again at those studies.

She wrote:

“We are still suffering from a dearth of robust research about this topic! I have a 40-year-old son with autism spectrum disorder who astonished us with spontaneous reading and spelling at age 3. The comprehension issue was always there but interfered with learning from about age 10 onwards. Since I’ve piqued your interest, I’d like to share my perspective with you.  

“When kindergarteners sit on the rug for reading time, and the teacher asks, “What’s going to happen next?” all the typically developing children have a pretty good answer. No one taught them how to predict, but they know how to gather up context clues and draw a conclusion at age 5. 

“The child with autism usually doesn’t answer because they don’t know what’s going to happen next and can’t guess. Who notices that they have no answer 100% of the time? No one. If the child does answer, it’s usually way off the mark and perhaps related to their special interest in dinosaurs, etc.

“No one worries about this or has a reason to teach that child to predict, especially if the child was a brilliant decoder since preschool. One way that I know this is from my experience as a professional advocate for 200 families in my early career, observing my little clients at school.

“Asking a child to predict is not the same as teaching a child to predict. I know you agree with this, like when you say that asking a student to answer comprehension questions is not an instructional method! 

“When I was doing my post-master’s certificate in Special Education in the late 2000’s I worked 1:1 with children with autism in the California State Northridge Literacy Lab. I was working with a second grader with autism who could not decode and didn’t understand what he read.

“I used a computer program with pictures and hints to work on predicting. He couldn’t do the second-grade level, first-grade level or Kindergarten level. Zero success in all attempts. 

“This is one example of why ‘tweaking’ typical instructional methods does not work for this population. Features of autism cause a ‘Swiss cheese’ effect of looking good from the outside but having hidden skill gaps. 

“One woman with autism told me that when she reads, it’s like highlighting everything in grey, because all the words and sentences have equal importance and nothing stands out as the main idea….How can you summarize a paragraph, study, or write about a passage if you don’t know what information is important?

“Cognitive issues in the autistic profile such as weak central coherence and Theory of Mind (a form of inference) also impact comprehension and learning. Essential (usually innate) prerequisite skills for using comprehension strategies are NOT intact. As a result, teaching must be tailored to the cognitive profile and learning needs of readers with ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorder]. Teachers and parents want to know what to do and how to teach. Research is NOT giving us the answers we need! I’m not comfortable generalizing from a study with 2 participants to this whole population!”

See what I mean. Lots of juicy insight and an honest disappointment in the research – which I assiduously began to read more carefully. Here is what I found out.

First, there’s much variation in the population that is burdened with autism. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “People with autism have a wide range of symptoms, which can include differences in social and communication behaviors, intellectual disabilities, and other physical and mental health conditions. People with autism also have a wide range of health care and service needs.”

That’s true regarding reading (Brown, et al., 2012; Ricketts, 2011; Sotáková & Kucharská, 2017).  There are kids like the ones that Emily describes in her letter, hyperlexic when it comes to decoding and spelling but with lagging comprehension abilities. This results because many people with ASD may tend to super focus on one thing, often to the exclusion of all else. When a kindergartener tries to figure out spelling patterns that level of attention can be helpful. However, some estimates claim hyperlexia affects only 5-10% of the ASD population (Brown, et al., 2012).

Confusingly, studies identify these kids as gifted at decoding, poor at decoding, and typical of the general population when it comes to reading words!

My sense of the studies? Kids with ASD are marginally more likely to struggle with decoding and/or spelling than the general population (Brown, et al., 2012; Henderson, Clarke, & Snowling, 2014; McClain, et al., 2021; Nation & Norbury, 2005; Nicolosi & Dillenburger, 2024). Randi, Newman, & Grigorenko, 2010 ; Sorenson, et al., 2021 ; Sotáková & Kucharská, 2017). These kids tend to have problems with attention, speech, language, and social interactions. Those may interfere with any kind of learning, and some (such as speech difficulties) can be especially problematic for learning phonics. Given that, I would expect the ASD population to struggle a bit with decoding.

However, I doubt that low decoding is a characteristic of ASD. That’s because there is no reason why ASD would be especially disruptive of decoding ability. There isn’t a part of the condition that is necessarily and specifically disruptive of the attainment of decoding abilities.

Most young kids struggle with attention. Some of them have special problems with it, ADHD for instance, without being on the spectrum. But the attention spans of normally developing kids are notoriously limited at the ages when basic decoding is taught. The specific thing about the inattention of ASD kids is that theirs may be the result of intensive attention to something else. But this kind of inattention interferes with learning in the same way that anybody else’s does.

That ability to be super attentive is probably why there is that bubble of kids with hyperlexia – the ability to read words well beyond comprehension ability.

That means you can’t assume that an ASD diagnosis tells you anything about the likelihood of decoding success. It is essential that these students be screened just like anyone else. It really matters little that a higher percentage of kids with ASD are hyperlexic, if the kid in your class isn’t making adequate progress. It also matters that there is no special ASD-reason for those decoding challenges. Garden variety good teaching would be likely to remediate those learning gaps successfully.

The same kind of issue arises with English Learners (EL). That group doesn’t have any special learning problems. They suffer from maladies like dyslexia and autism as often as native English speakers. Their “special” barrier to reading progress is mainly due to a lack of proficiency with the English language. It’s hard to read in a language that you do not know.

Nevertheless, ELs may struggle with English decoding. The assumption that an English Learner’s reading problems will only be due to a lack of English proficiency will be wrong often enough that we should take care to avoid that notion. It’s better to assess and be certain, than to guess and, consequently, fail to meet these kids’ learning needs.

Something similar may be afoot for kids with ASD. More of them are likely to struggle with comprehension than decoding, but that doesn’t mean that many of them don’t have decoding difficulties that need to be addressed. A large-scale observational study in Grades 4-9 (Solis & McKenna, 2023) found that much of the reading instruction for kids with ASD focused on reading comprehension (mainly having them read and answer questions – which, in my opinion, is more about monitoring than teaching). According to the researchers, these kids received little word reading instruction, despite 46% of them testing below average in those skills.

However, as Emily Iland explained in her letter… there are special problems for ASD kids when it comes to reading comprehension. That’s where it gets really interesting.

Interesting both in terms of what it says about teaching kids with ASD – and regarding teaching reading comprehension to everyone.

References

Brown, H. M., Oram-Cardy, J., & Johnson, A. (2012). A meta-analysis of the reading comprehension skills of individuals on the autism spectrum. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 932-955. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10803-012-1638-1

Conner, C., Alor, J. H., Al Otaiba, S., Yovanoff, P., & LeJeune, L. (2024). Early reading outcomes in response to a comprehensive reading curriculum for students with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 39(2), 71-83. https://doi.org/10.1177/10883576221137905

Grimm, R. P., Solari, E. J., McIntyre, N. S., Zajic, M., & Mundy, P. C. (2018). Comparing growth in linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension in school-aged children with autism versus typically developing children. Autism Research: Official Journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 11(4), 624–635. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1914

Nation, K., & Norbury, C. F. (2005). Why reading comprehension fails: Insights from developmental disorders. Topics in Language Disorders, 25(1), 21–32. 

https://doi.org/10.1097/00011363-200501000-00004

Nicolosi, M., & Dillenburger, K. (2024). The effect of phonics skills intervention on early reading comprehension in an adolescent with autism: A longitudinal study. Behavioral Interventions, 39(3), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1002/bin.2007

Randi, J., Newman, T. & Grigorenko, E. L. (2010). Teaching children with autism to read for meaning: Challenges and possibilities. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40, 890–902. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-0938-6

Ricketts, J., Jones, C. R., Happ., F., & Charman, T. (2013). Reading comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: the role of oral language and social functioning. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 807–816. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10803-012-1619-4

Solis, M., & McKenna, J. W. (2023). Reading instruction for students with autism spectrum disorder: Comparing observations of instruction to student reading profiles. Journal of Behavioral Education.

Sorenson Duncan, T., Karkada, M., Deacon, S. H., & Smith, I. M. (2021). Building meaning: Meta?analysis of component skills supporting reading comprehension in children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 14(5), 840-858. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2483

Sotáková, H., & Kucharská, A. (2017). The level of social relations comprehension and its impact on text comprehension in individuals with autistic spectrum disorder. Health Psychology Report, 5(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.5114/hpr.2017.62725

 

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