"Autism at-a-Glance" is a series of practitioner and family-friendly documents created by the Center on Secondary Education for Students with ASD (CSESA) designed for high school staff members supporting students on the autism spectrum, as well as family members of adolescents with ASD. The purpose of the "Autism at-a-Glance"…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the broader college and career readiness agenda encourage educators, researchers, and other stakeholders to focus on preparing students for life after high school. A key emphasis is literacy, as the ability to read and comprehend written language is critical to success in college and careers.…

In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

Reading and listening comprehension tasks were combined in exercises using related printed and taped texts. Linking the tasks enables the student to use whichever skill is stronger to boost performance in the weaker skill. The technique is outlined and methods of adapting it to other teacher situations are discussed. (MSE)

Oral production (the speech act) and the comprehension of written and oral texts have long been treated as separate entities when they could be used in an integrated approach to teach a broader range of language skills. The receptive aspects of the speech act should be brought into language instruction and used to select materials for teaching…

The investigation compared the transparency of 11 different types of symbols with 40 nonspeaking mentally retarded subjects (ages 4-20). Analysis indicated a hierarchy of difficulty with actual objects the easiest and Blissymbols and written words the hardest to understand. Results have implications for selecting initial symbol systems for…

The manual for administration of the Chinese Proficiency Test contains an overview of the program, including: (1) its history, content, and format; (2) its primary focus and uses; (3) administration procedures, including registration, ordering the test, reporting scores, and billing; (4) the interpretation of test scores based on normative data…

This book presents a method for the qualitative assessment of text difficulty, a method that relies on a total impression rather than on an analysis of text features. The method is based on matching samples of text to exemplars that have been scaled for comprehension difficulty. These exemplars range in difficulty from those suitable for the…

Guidelines for selecting and using pictures to guide instructional decisions and behaviors are based on three areas of research: role of pictures and how they improve learning, how context or environment in which pictures operate can influence usefulness, and how physical and perceptual characteristics of pictures affect their function. (MBR)

Presents an approach for helping students to explore the auditory level of meaning of a poem in a step-by-step manner. (TJ)

To explore whether different balances of fiction/non-fiction reading and challenge might help explain differences in reading achievement between genders, data on 45,670 pupils who independently read over 3 million books were analysed. Moderate (rather than high or low) levels of challenge were positively associated with achievement gain, but…

The curriculum guide for Ohio's secondary level programs in English as a second language (ESL) begins with background information on factors to consider in developing an ESL curriculum, including limited-English-proficient students' characteristics, the language acquisition process, skill areas to be covered, instructional goals for four major…

The guide presents the newly-developed curriculum of the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana at Iztapalapa (Mexico) for its program in English as a foreign language. An introductory section provides background information on the initiative to design a new curriculum. The second section presents the principles on which the curriculum and its methods…

The study reported in this paper investigated the effects of a frequently recommended study technique on the comprehension of expository text by high-school students having learning disabilities. The instructional procedure studied was "Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review" (SQ3R). Six experiments were conducted over a 3-year period,…

The concept of comprehensible input in second language learning is applied to the teaching of English as a Second Language. Techniques for teacher adaptation of materials and classroom presentation are outlined. The first step is assembly of topic-appropriate pictures and the production of simple third-person statements to accompany them. Leisure…