By Sara Finegan 

         Kids with learning disabilities often struggle with reading comprehension.   As I stated in an earlier post, reading comprehension is a relationship with the written word comprised of a number of behaviors.  One of these behaviors is inferring.  

         Making inferences about characters, the setting, motives, the problem, and possible solutions requires that a reader move beyond literal comprehension and start putting pieces of the story together.  This is often very difficult for the struggling reader and when a child has expressive or receptive language deficits, it can be even more complicated.

         In General Education, we teach that making inferences while we read is like reading  between the lines to see what the author is showing us about what’s going on in the story.  This is an excellent explanation for most of us, but when a child is a concrete thinker who focuses almost entirely on the surface meaning of things, it doesn’t resonate very well.

          Students with learning disabilities who don’t make inferences while reading are not going to learn how to do so by explanation:  I can yack all I want about inferring and even model how it’s done, but that is unlikely to have positive results unless we get the kids to actually start doing it.

          And the way to do that is to show the kids that they already do make inferences, constantly, in their own lives.

          Start by taking a look at the types of inferences we all make each and every day: 

• We infer how people are feeling by their facial expressions and body language.
• We infer people’s attitudes by comments they make and tones of voice. 
• We make inferences about why our students are behaving certain ways based on what we know of their home situations, health, or relationships with their peers. 

           I like to tell the kids stories about real-life events and encourage them to recognize the inferences we make:

Me:  Yesterday morning, the sink in the kitchen was clogged, and my husband spent about 30 minutes before we left for school trying to fix it.  I was popping in and out to check on his progress while I was getting dressed.  He had his head in the plumbing and was giving these deep sighs, like this (sighing heavily) and muttering under his breath like this (muttering) and at one point he even cursed at the cats.  (Pause for comments.) 

Me:  Anyone?

Jonathan:  Oh, he was mad.

Sandra:  I bet he was frustrated! 

Me:  See, you two made excellent inferences!  Jonathan, what made you infer that he was angry? 

Jonathan:  He was cursing.  And that muttering thing. 

Me:  Yep, yep.  And Sandra, how did you know he was frustrated? 

Sandra:  He was sighing.  And muttering.  And my dad curses when he’s frustrated or mad. 

Me:  Terrific!  Both of you could support your inferences with info from my story.  Anyway, this afternoon when we came home, he called the plumber.  I had to go to the grocery store, so I missed it when the plumber got there.  But when I came home, Richard was calling to the bank to find out how much money we have in our account, and looking very serious.  He said “We might not be able to buy that new stereo this month.”  (Pause for comments.) 

Jayme:  He was disappointed. 

Simone:  It’s going to be expensive to fix the sink. 

Me:  Oh, wow!  Two good inferences!  Jayme, what made you infer that he was disappointed?

 Jayme:  Because he looked serious and he can’t buy the new stereo now.

 Me:  Ah, good!  Simone?  What makes you infer that the repair is going to cost a lot of money? 

Simone:  Because he had to call the bank. 

Me:  Anything else?

Tommy:  Because he won’t be able to afford the new stereo.

TIP:  Keep showing the kids how they already make a lot of inferences.  Name what they’re doing:  they won’t connect the fact that they’re making inferences with the reading strategy unless it has a name that is used frequently and that they understand through experience.

          The next step involves making inferences about visuals in print.  I like to use cartoons and comics.  I’ve got a bunch of them laminated that I pull out and let the kids mess with for awhile.  I like to listen to them talk about the pictures, and I ask some open-ended questions, such as “how do the people feel?”  “Why is he doing that?”  “What is the problem in this picture?” 

         When we have a share-out about the comics and illustrations, we identify all of the inferences that the kids have made.  Then I explain that they are going to learn how to do it when they read stories, too.  

         You can also have kids practice making inferences during read-aloud time.  When you are reading a high-interest story out loud, whether it’s Harry Potter, or The Book of Three, or Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, you can pause periodically and ask for some inferences.  Keep a chart of all of the inferences the students suggest, and ask them to track those inferences as the story moves on. 

         I like to have kids do some short-text inferring practice in guided reading groups and also independently before they move to practicing the strategy with their independent reading books.  You can throw together some paragraphs and multiple-choice or short answer worksheets that ask kids to make inferences about characters or situations based on passages.  I’ve included some here as examples.

         Practicing making inferences in independent reading work should take place over a period of time with accountability and exclusivity. 

• When I say “a period of time,” I mean that you should encourage and support the reader for between a week and a month as she or he develops competence in the strategy. 
• When I say “accountability,” I mean that your student needs to be able to show you the inferences being made.  Sometimes this can be by giving the child post-its and asking him or her to record each inference on a post-it during reading time and placing the post-it in the margin of the passage in question.  Then, during conferring time, you can talk about the inferences made and see how the child is thinking and processing.  This will give you insight into where there still may be some weaknesses and what supports you might need to add.
• When I say “exclusivity,” I mean that we should not ask a child to practice more than one brand-new comprehension strategy at a time.  Give the student time to develop strength and ability in making inferences, to gain experience in how it’s done and what it means during his or her independent reading. 

         There will be time later to work on other strategies.  In a demanding classroom, students learn one step at a time, strengthening each new facet of thinking until it can be added to their repertoire of skills.

connections · demanding classroom · expressive language · high expectations · inferences · inferencing · inferring · language deficits · learning disabilities · learning disabled · reading behaviors · receptive language · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards · understanding

By Sara Finegan

         I post on a lot of message boards about learning disabilities and autism, and I also get a lot of emails from people who are following my blogs.  One of the most frequent topics is:  how a teacher told a parent that a student “doesn’t have reading comprehension.”

         Naturally, the parents want to know what to do. 

         The problem, of course, is that reading comprehension isn’t something you “HAVE” or “GET”, as in purchasing at a store or obtaining through a tutor.  You can’t put it on and take it off like a sweater, and you can’t keep it in the fridge until you need it.

         Reading comprehension is all about a reader’s relationship to text, and is based almost entirely on his or  her engagement and interaction with the piece being read.  It’s the relationship.  Relationship, relationship, relationship.

         Thinking of it in terms of a relationship leads me to the next step, which is to ask whether, when a friend discusses  a relationship that is flawed or failing, we simply let him or her  say “it’s not good” and leave it at that, or whether we start probing and asking questions to try to piece out what’s going on (or not going on).

         If you’re the kind of person who runs a demanding classroom, that’s exactly what you do.

What is this relationship with text made up of? 

         What behaviors does one see in a good relationship with text?  I’m ready to talk about a few, and will post more at another time.

         We’ll start with fiction and narrative.  (The relationship a reader has with informational, non-fiction text involves some different behaviors, so that will be the topic of another post.)  Research has shown that good readers of fiction do a number of different things when they read: 

• They visualize what they are reading about.  Like a movie in one’s head, a good reader sees what the text is describing.  This helps the reader enter into the world of the story, and leads to all sorts of other behaviors we like to see.
• They make inferences based on what they’re reading.  Good readers know that, in the best stories, the author shows you what’s happening instead of telling you directly, and they are able to infer ideas, feelings, and motives, not to mention facts, from what the author does with words.
• They ask questions as they read.  Lots of questions, knowing that they will find the answers in the story as it moves along.  This is done especially when they are trying to figure out what is going on, but also when they are thinking about things like character motives, and the conflict in the story.
• They use their background knowledge (personal, and from other stories they’ve read, as well as knowledge about the genre) to make predictions.  A good reader is going to know in a fantasy novel that there is going to be a struggle between good and evil, and that magical or fantastical creatures are probably going to play a role in the battle.  A good reader is going to use her personal knowledge of what it’s like to be the youngest in the family to predict how a baby sister may react during a family holiday. 
• They make connections between their own experiences and feelings and those of characters in the book.  They also make connections between world events and issues and people and events in the book.  And they make connections between stories, comparing one character in a book to a character in another book, etc.
• They check for understanding, pausing periodically to make sure they know what’s happening, and going back and re-reading if it’s unclear to them.

         It is our obligation as teachers to investigate, when a child clearly isn’t understanding what she or he is reading, what behaviors the child is engaging in, and what reading behaviors are weak.  It is based on this information that we can devise interventions that work, supports that help the child begin to make meaning from text.

         In a demanding classroom, the staff pays attention to each reader, keeping notes or logs about conferring sessions, guided reading interactions, and other data that will help them determine what skills to teach next. 

          In a demanding classroom, the teacher can, with pretty good specificity, explain to parents and colleagues what particular areas of need the child has with regard to his or her relationship to a book or story. 

          And in a demanding classroom, a report at a parent conference that “Johnny doesn’t understand what he’s reading” is followed immediately by  “and I have observed him and conferred with him, and I think here’s what’s going on and what our next steps should be.” 

For more of my posts on reading comprehension teaching strategies, see our other blog, Readers With Autism: http://readerswithautism.com .

autism · background knowledge · connections · demanding classroom · fiction · high expectations · inferences · inferencing · learning disabilities · learning disabled · narrative · predictions · questioning · questions · Reading · reading behaviors · reading comprehension · relationship · relationship with text · rigor · Sara Finegan · special education · standards · teaching strategies · understanding · visualization · visualize

 By Sara Finegan

          By far the most common deficits we see in the special ed classroom are problems with reading.  The vast majority of our students do not read close to grade level, and this impairs their ability to make progress in the general education curriculum independently. 

           Reading skills have very little to do with intelligence and everything to do with the way the brain perceives the task.  I have had more than one student classified as GATE (Gifted and Talented)  in the fifth or sixth grade, who reads at the first grade level. 

          The problem with reading deficits is not only how they pervade all aspects of the curriculum but that they discourage most kids from doing the work that will improve the skills:  reading.    Most of the kids who don’t read well also don’t read.  At least, not until they get to a demanding classroom.

          And why should they?  It’s exhausting, halting, stuttering, discouraging, boring, and one never ceases to be reminded that one doesn’t do it well. 

          There are a gazillion programs out there which purport to (and often do!) improve students’ ability to read.  There are books and books, articles and more articles about interventions and strategies that work.   I particularly enjoy attending workshops and other professional development opportunities dealing with reading instruction.  I collect as much information and as many ideas as I can, and use them in a myriad of ways to support reading in the classroom. 

Types of reading skill

          Reading skills can be boiled to several types, and it’s important that we address all of them, with rigor, in the demanding classroom.  They are as follows:

1.   Decoding 

         Obviously, phonemic awareness and the understanding of the sounds the letters make and how they become words is important.  Our students need to be aware of the long and short vowel sounds, blends, and other aspects of the decoding process.  It’s the cornerstone of the mechanics of reading, after all.   

           Or is it?  I’m not so sure.  Certainly, it’s an important skill to have.  But how often do good readers decode words, really?  I paid attention to my own reading for a week, and I only decoded once – and it was a latin word.  What I mostly did was…

             …recognize words.  Which brings me to the next type of reading mechanics:

2.   Sight words.

         Turns out that in my reading, I mostly scan over the text and recognize each of the words.  I don’t sound them out, even the big words, because I know them already as soon as I see them.  Most people I know who are good readers do the same thing. 

          It also turns out that our students, the ones with profound reading deficits, don’t recognize most words.  Sometimes it’s because of visual processing slowness, or because of visual memory issues.  Sometimes it’s because they don’t see a lot of words very often.  After all, if you  never read, dreaded reading, you wouldn’t know many words. 

         Whatever the reason for a low bank of sight words in ones brain, this must be addressed, intensively, consistently, and with the student involved in setting measurable goals. 

           This year, each of my 5th and 6th grade students has decided that they want to increase their sight word vocabulary by 15 words a week, which translates to about 60 words per month, or 600 for the whole school year. 

           I get to pick the words.  And I don’t pick easy ones – the one-syllable, simple words that occur most frequently will be picked up automatically as we increase our reading stamina and practice fluency.  I pick the two and three-syllable words that trip kids up.  I’ll post October’s list somewhere in here, I promise. 

           Every child gets sight words flashcards to carry around from home to school and back, and they are assiduous in practicing with each other daily while I’m taking roll or collecting papers.  They got their parents involved by asking them to sign a “reading helper” contract – so now, parents or siblings work with them at home.  This is not as easy as it sounds:  some of my students come from families where English is not spoken in the home or where the parents aren’t literate.  This is where older and younger siblings, cousins, and neighbors help out.  Somehow or another, every one of my students mastered 80 words between September 8 and October 1.  EIGHTY!  

          Confidence increases exponentially when kids can recognize words, especially the hard words that always made them stumble, crash and burn in previous reading projects.  You can bet that the kids are more eager to read independently now.

3.   Reading fluency.

          Fluency is the ability to read quickly and smoothly, with inflection, not stumbling over too many words (we all do when we read out loud, at least occasionally), infusing drama into the voice. 

          Most kids with reading deficits don’t have the voice in their heads telling them the story as they read.  They read like robots, one word at a time, staccato.  There’s no feeling, no expression, and certainly not a lot of attention to what’s going on in the text – the kids are too busy just dealing with the mechanics of reading.

         Until and unless we work with them on reading fluency, they aren’t going to hear that voice in their heads (the healthy kind!).  They aren’t going to enjoy reading, and they aren’t going to have the strength and stamina to figure out much of what is going on in the story.

         My favorite reading fluency program is Read Naturally, which I think has been around forever, or at least a long time.  And no, I don’t get paid to write about it.  Read Naturally is a series of stories on tape and on paper, which kids listen to and read out loud over and over and over again, practicing speed and inflection.  There’s a timed component to it that many teachers use to help kids build their speed of reading, but I never have managed to do much with it, and I don’t actually use the tapes very much either.  It’s the one-page human interest stories that  we focus on.

          Read Naturally text goes from primer to the higher-grade levels of reading, moving up by half-grade levels.   The stories start out with a larger font, shorter text, and move into smaller font, more complex sentences, and longer paragraphs gradually through the levels.  It seems to progress at just the right measure for kids.

          This year, my kids all set a fluency goal as well, which is related to their ability to decode and recognize words, of course.  They aimed high – they all want to be reading at grade level by the end of the year.  This is certainly doable if we are talking about decoding and fluency –if the kids do the work consistently. 

          So far, they’re all on track with their goals to increase by a half-grade level in fluency every six weeks.  I  have advised them that the higher the level, the more difficult each text will be to practice and master fluently, and that we may need to tweak how often we work at it – but I have not said anything about adjusting their goals or expectations.

           This is the first year we have all tackled fluency with such rigor, and it’s because last year, one of my students jumped from a first grade reading level to the fifth grade in a matter of months by using Read Naturally every day at home and school.  This inspired his friends, and now they’re all gung-ho.  They eagerly ask to read to me every morning, and are mastering between two and three stories per week so far.    The amount of work they are putting in at school and at home means they are increasing something else, which leads me to the fourth leg on the stool we call reading technique…

 4.   Reading stamina.

         Reading stamina is the ability to read for long periods of time with focus and purpose.  Avid readers like me can read all day, even taking our books to the bathroom or holding them while we cook dinner.  Students with reading deficits are often lucky to be able to read for five minutes at a time.  Last year, my student David, who has both ADHD and autism, lasted 11 SECONDS at a time with text at the primer level.  I still dream about that.

          I have not, I confess, spent a lot of time working on stamina as an isolated skill.  I get caught up in some of the more engaging aspects of reading instruction – and by that I mean activities in which I get to engage with my students.  Stamina is something that one develops solo.  And I find that it increases exponentially as students develop the technical and cognitive skills to read and understand. 

          These days, David reads for about 12 minutes at a time.   With a third grade text.  He will be moving up to level 3.5 next week.

Turn that rickety stool into an armchair.

          Reading is a skill that we all rely on in life.  For some, it’s an unwieldy and rickety stool that’s missing a leg and whose seat comes unscrewed every few days.  For others, it’s a cushy, comfy armchair in whose depths we can sink and disappear into worlds and characters without limit.  The one thing we all have in common is that we need something to rest our butts on, and legs to hold us up. 

         In a demanding classroom, reading instruction is precisely-customized to individual student needs, and most of the time is devoted to practicing.  In a demanding classroom, students participate in setting goals and measuring progress.

decoding · demanding classroom · fluency · GATE · high expectations · learning disabled · phonemic awareness · Read Naturally · reading deficits · reading mechanics · reading stamina · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · sight words · special education · standards · vocabulary

         Much of the work I do in helping my students to read can be found at http://www.readerswithautism.com/.  Don’t let the title of the blog mislead you:  the comprehension interventions I’ve designed and discovered work with almost all students with mild-moderate learning disabilities, and can be customized to accommodate all sorts of learning needs.  

            Our Readers with Autism blog focuses primarily on the work we do in my classroom to support comprehension in reading fiction. 

            But that, of course, is not the sum total of reading instruction required to bring our kids to grade level.  From time to time, I will share ideas and instructional units and strategies that can be found in the most demanding classrooms.  I invite you to share your ideas and practices too, so that we can all become better at what we do.

autism · autism spectrum · demanding classroom · high expectations · hyperlexia · learning disabled · reading comprehension · rigor · rigorous instruction · Sara Finegan · special education · standards