Exploration of strategies for facilitating the reading comprehension of high-functioning students with autism spectrum disorders.

The team worked with high-school students who have autism.

They tested three ways to help the teens understand what they read.

One way was anaphoric cuing: the adult asked, "Who is ‘he’ in this line?" so the student had to look back and link the pronoun to its noun.

The other ways were prereading questions and fill-in-the-blank sheets.

Each student tried all three methods in turn while the teachers tracked quiz scores.

Anaphoric cuing beat the other two methods.

When students had to name the antecedent for each pronoun, their quiz scores rose by a clear, medium-sized margin.

The gains showed up right away and stayed while the cueing continued.

El Zein et al. (2014) looked at every reading study for students with autism and listed anaphoric cuing as one promising tool.

Whalon et al. (2019) asked younger kids to match pictures to story parts during listening, not reading.

Both papers found that pointing students back to the text helps, even when the cue changes from pronouns to pictures or from reading to listening.

Nicolosi et al. (2024) took the idea the other direction: they taught a non-speaking teen phonics for two years and saw early comprehension emerge.

Together the four studies form a staircase: cues for fluent readers, visual story maps for listeners, and basic phonics for emergent readers.

You can add anaphoric cuing to any reading lesson in minutes.

While the student reads, stop at each pronoun and ask, "Who is this word talking about?"

Have the student point back to the name.

This quick habit raised comprehension in high-functioning teens and fits naturally into middle- and high-school English classes.