Reading Comprehension Instruction for Young Students with Autism: Forming Contextual Connections.

Central coherence is the ability to perceive and connect salient information in a context such as a narrative text. Individuals with autism exhibit a detail-focused cognitive style of processing information that overlooks connections and shows weak central coherence. A six-session instructional intervention to foster coherence processing was administered to first and second graders (N = 10) while a control group (N = 10) received an irrelevant treatment, mean age 7.06 years, 18 males and 2 females. Results showed that the instruction benefited children's comprehension of narrative text. The intervention improved children's ability to retell a narrative text and improved first graders' use of sequence words to retell a story compared to control students. Findings carry implications for designing reading instruction for this special population.

Effectiveness of a Partial Read-Aloud Test Accommodation to Assess Reading Comprehension in Students With a Reading Disability.

This experiment examined whether a partial read-aloud accommodation with pacing (PRAP) would improve the reading comprehension of poor decoders but not average decoders compared to standard testing procedures. Participants were 82 third graders with at least average listening comprehension skills: 28 were poor decoders, and 54 were average decoders; mean age 8 years, 9 months (8:9). In the PRAP condition, students' were paced through the Gates MacGinitie reading comprehension test. The examiner read aloud only directions, proper nouns, and questions with multiple choice answers while students read the passages independently. PRAP was compared to a standard testing condition and a pacing only condition. Poor decoders' reading comprehension was significantly higher under PRAP than under either the pacing or standard testing ( p < .01), whereas average decoders did not benefit from the PRAP procedure. Results support PRAP as a valid test accommodation procedure for readers who struggle with decoding but not listening comprehension. Results support the simple view of reading and show its value in the design of test accommodations for a specific type of reading disability.

Morpho-phonemic analysis boosts word reading for adult struggling readers.

A randomized control trial compared the effects of two kinds of vocabulary instruction on component reading skills of adult struggling readers. Participants seeking alternative high school diplomas received 8 h of scripted tutoring to learn forty academic vocabulary words embedded within a civics curriculum. They were matched for language background and reading levels, then randomly assigned to either morpho-phonemic analysis teaching word origins, morpheme and syllable structures, or traditional whole word study teaching multiple sentence contexts, meaningful connections, and spellings. Both groups made comparable gains in learning the target words, but the morpho-phonemic group showed greater gains in reading unfamiliar words on standardized tests of word reading, including word attack and word recognition. Findings support theories of word learning and literacy that promote explicit instruction in word analysis to increase poor readers' linguistic awareness by revealing connections between morphological, phonological, and orthographic structures within words.

Graphosyllabic analysis helps adolescent struggling readers read and spell words.

Adolescents with word-reading skills below grade level were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. Those receiving interventions practiced reading 100 multisyllabic words, either by analyzing graphosyllabic units in the words or by reading the words as unanalyzed wholes. The third group received no special instruction. Posttests revealed that graphosyllabic instruction helped students to decode novel words, remember how to read words with practice, and remember the spellings of words when compared to controls. In contrast, whole-word instruction yielded no benefit on transfer tasks compared to controls. Effects were observed primarily among adolescents reading at a third-grade-equivalent level and less so at a fourth- and fifth-grade-equivalent level. Results are consistent with a connectionist view of word learning and indicate the importance of providing struggling readers with instruction and practice in how to fully analyze the graphosyllabic constituents of words.