The Often Overlooked Importance of Literacy

Unfortunately, our educational system grossly underestimates the potential of students with disabilities, especially those who don’t verbally communicate. That means that parents must take a very active approach in ensuring that their child has access to proper curriculum that is in line with the way that they process and learn. I’m sure most of you have had experiences where the school informs you of the curriculum that they use in the classroom. While there definitely is a basal, or basic curriculum inside a regular education classroom, special education classrooms are supposed to be “special” and provide for the unique needs of their students. That generally means that each student requires a different approach. No two students learn the same way and at the same rate.

Grim Statistics

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 37% of 4th to 12th grade students in the US have achieved proficiency in reading, and this doesn’t even take students with disabilities into account. This 37% is of all students. For 63% of students who struggle with literacy, there are negative impacts on future academic success. Literacy is not just about learning to read books, but it also affects a student’s ability to learn science, history, math and even grocery shopping. Think about how often on your job that you read emails, instructional materials, signs and labels. If we don’t take it upon ourselves to insist that our children make meaningful academic progress in school, which they have the legal right to receive, they will have a lifetime of negative implications as a result.

Something that I have been noticing more and more is that many students with autism, ADHD, behavioral issues, and intellectual impairments experience unidentified learning disabilities. Once the school has labeled a student as ASD, for example, they tend to stop thinking about other things that could be affecting their ability to learn, and instead implement a curriculum that may have worked with another student with autism. But as we know, if you’ve seen one person with autism, you’ve seen one person with autism. And that goes for kids too.

Once a student learns how to read, the world tends to open up. Think about it.. written language can be especially beneficial for kids who struggle with reading, in that they are able to control the amount of information they take in at one time and can reread as needed. This makes reading and writing a potentially less stressful means than spoken language (look at all of the progress being discovered through the Spelling to Communicate approach for students who are nonspeakers). Improved literacy skills better prepare students for situations that demand comprehension of written text and/or verbal interactions, making them important skills to promote and encourage beyond  the basic school curriculum.

How Do We Facilitate Literacy Development?

The following are some recommendations from the Center on Secondary Education for Students with ASD. While it is from an autism org, nearly anyone can find them helpful when teaching kids to read.

Take Advantage of Existing Interests – Provide your child with books that are about things in which they have already shown interest in (e.g. American history, types of cars, space exploration). This will provide internal motivation for them to read, which can be expanded upon later into a wider range of topics. You can also provide choices between multiple options of reading material, so that your child feels engaged in the activity.

Activate Prior Knowledge and Build Background Information – Before Reading – Often students with ASD are not as familiar with in-school and out-of-school activities (e.g., recreational activities, sports teams, clubs) as their peers, and may have more limited topics of interest, which leads to a less extensive store of background knowledge related a broad variety of topics and themes. For reading material covering topics in which your teen does not already have an established interest, it can be beneficial for successful comprehension to expose them to an overview of the chosen subject before diving into the text. An example of this would be watching an educational YouTube video on the subject prior to reading. Being equipped in advance with this relevant background knowledge gives your teen material to connect new information to while reading the text to help make inferences that fill in gaps in the text and contribute to higher level understanding.

Use Visuals – Ensure the literacy resources used have a balanced ratio of pictures and illustrations to text, as research has shown that many students benefit from visual supports. Coupling images with the words on a page can result in higher levels of retention.

Use graphic organizers with them at home when they are reading both narrative and content area texts. The Florida Center for Reading Research has some excellent, free online resources that can be adapted for any age.

Balance Task Difficulty – Students with ASD will not want to return to an activity that triggers feelings of frustration or insecurity that may be caused by too much exposure to upper-level reading materials too quickly. To avoid this frustration, balance higher level reading tasks, such as books that require readers to have a wider range of vocabulary and background knowledge, with lower-level reading tasks, such as comic books or computer games that may have more visuals than other literacy tasks. Building upon success and enjoyment of reading lower-level materials may challenge them to persevere and read at the higher level.

Utilize All Available Resources – Do not limit your literacy resources to books. You can help to ensure continued interest in reading by using a variety of material such as:

• educational computer games

• word-based board games

• comic books

• magazines

• newspapers

• park or restaurant signs

• online content on topics of interest

Try to incorporate literacy into activities that are a part of your teen’s everyday routines (e.g.., reading through the lyrics of their favorite song) to improve their operational understanding of literacy. This way, they are exposed to literacy practices more often, and in contexts that are more generalizable to real world situations.

Read Aloud & Think Aloud – Research shows that students benefit from watching and using other individuals as a model for the behavior they want to perform. In this way, reading aloud with your teen supports their fluency development and helps them to learn with material that they might not have been able to comprehend on their own due to reading level restrictions. Reading aloud to a student can also help them understand how to use expression and tone to convey meaning in a way that they might not have been able to pick up on otherwise.

Ask Questions, Reread, & Retell – Pausing to ask questions during the reading can increase both comprehension and retention of the reading material. You can ask different questions based on the kind of material your teen is interacting with at the time. With a fictional story about specific characters, a good question to facilitate emotional comprehension might be “How do you think ____ is feeling about ____?” Try to ask questions that require some degree of inference generation, so that your teen can hone skills like drawing from personal experience and knowledge. You can also ask general questions like “What do you think about the story so far?” to give your teen an opportunity to express their own thoughts and feelings about what they have read. Additionally, ask your teen to pose their own questions about the text.

Resources

Literacy Games
Bank Street College of Education. (1997). Six Games for Reading.
Retrieved from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/six-gamesreading

Educational Literacy Apps
Common Sense Education. (n.d.). Elementary School Reading Apps
and Websites. Retrieved from
https://www.commonsense.org/education/top-picks/elementaryschool-reading-apps-and-websites

Reading Questions
Cam Everlands Primary School. (n.d.). Questions to ask your teen when you read together. Retrieved from
http://www.cameverlands.org.uk/questions-to-ask-your-child-whenyou-read-together/

AFIRM Module: Reinforcement
Sam, A., & AFIRM Team. (2015). Reinforcement. Chapel Hill, NC: National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorder, FPG Child Development Center, University of North Carolina. Retrieved from http://afirm.fpg.unc.edu/reinforcement

AFIRM Module: Visual Supports
Sam, A., & AFIRM Team. (2015). Visual supports. Chapel Hill, NC: National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorder, FPG Child Development Center, University of North Carolina. Retrieved from http://afirm.fpg.unc.edu/visual-supports

If your child isn’t making progress in reading, request an updated psychological evaluation so that you and your team can identify how your child learns. From that information, the team should work together to identify the curriculum that most closely matches their learning style. Keep 6 weeks worth of data, and reassess. If it’s not working, time to brainstorm again. Time is too valuable to waste!

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Happy Reading,
Stacey