The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

116 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 strategy that addresses how to interact with text and about text. Another strategy is a questioning strategy that promotes students’ abilities to form and ask questions (254). The following article also discusses reading comprehensions and presents its own strategies for comprehension instruction. The authors of “Teaching Children with Autism to Read for Meaning: Challenges and Possibilities” provide some reading comprehension interventions for children with ASDs. This article argues that reading comprehension instruction has, in general, been neglected inschools (Randi et al 897). To teachreadingcomprehension, teachers can benefit from using direct instruction, using authentic materials and rewards in natural settings, peer-mediated instruction, and computer-assisted instruction. The article promotes the idea of teaching students with ASD in a social setting by the use of peer- tutoring, interactive practicing, and games. In addition, the authors express that direct instruction is an effective way to teach oral language skills, and that it can help students with ASD increase their expressive language skills (899). Direct instruction, according to this article, is also helpful in improving reading comprehension skills because it teaches students to independently work on skills such as statement inference and using facts and analogies (899). At the end of the article, the authors present the growing need for researches to come up with new interventions to meet the needs of children with ASD (900). While this article focuses on multiple types of reading comprehension techniques, the following focuses on one specific technique: dialogic reading. Dialogic reading involves adults asking questions that encourage children to think critically and talk about books. Specifically, the authors of this article state, “Dialogic reading is a particular method of shared story reading in which the adult uses specific question prompts to encourage children to talk during book readings” (Fleury et al 240). This article observes a study that was conducted to determine whether children with ASD benefit more from standard book reading or dialogic reading. Because children are required to answer questions posed by adults in dialogic reading, they are given the opportunity to hear language and practice using it. The study concluded that children with ASD talked more during interactive dialogic reading than during baseline reading sessions with minimal initiated conversation (281). Children also participated