Tools and Techniques for Boosting Discourse-Level Comprehension

Abstract

This chapter looks at difficulties that students with autism have in understanding extended discourse—narratives, dialogues, and other extended tracts of language, both written and spoken. It first reviews the underlying challenges, including deficits in language, social knowledge, understanding of figurative language, and inferencing skills. It also discusses reading-specific challenges like decoding, homographs, the need to use background knowledge to make sense of ambiguous sentence structures, determining the referents of pronouns and other anaphora, keeping track of the big picture, and monitoring one's comprehension while reading. It then reviews general interventions: question asking and question generating, making predictions, explicit instruction, and computerized approaches. Next it turns to more targeted tools and interventions: interventions addressing figurative language, pronouns, inferences, self-monitoring and background knowledge; and tools involving linguistic rules and graphic organizers. It closes with a discussion of what is known about the efficacy of the various interventions.