Building Reading Comprehension Skills with AAC Users

Reading comprehension can be especially challenging for students who are non-speaking, minimally speaking, or who use AAC devices. Not because they are incapable of understanding, but because the way they show what they know is often very different from what traditional instruction expects. My name is Winnie, and I've been teaching for the last 29 years, but the last 5 years have been in a self-contained special education elementary classroom. I have seen my students move from emergent readers to conventional readers, but the comprehension piece has remained a great challenge for me as a teacher and for my students. One major challenge is response access. Many comprehension activities require students to answer quickly, speak aloud, write independently, or explain their thinking in a sentence. A student who uses AAC device may know the answer, but finding the words, navigating the pages on the device, or even physically selecting responses can take much more time and effort. A second major challenge that I've seen in the classroom is language load. Reading comprehension already asks students to process vocabulary, sentence structure, background knowledge, and meaning all at once. For AAC users, there is often an extra layer because the language in the text may not match the language that is easily available on their device. They may understand the story but not have quick access to the exact words needed to retell, infer, predict, or answer higher-level questions. This can make their comprehension seem lower than it really is. And a third challenge that I've seen is incorrect assumptions from adults. Sometimes educators see limited speech and they assume limited understanding. As a result, students may be given simpler texts, fewer opportunities to engage in real comprehension work, or too much focus on basic labeling instead of deeper thinking. That can create a gap where the student is not being taught at the level that that they are actually capable of reaching. So the key is this. The challenge is not just comprehension itself, but access, expression, and opportunity. When we provide supports like wait time, visual choices, aided language modeling, and meaningful ways to respond, we often discover that these students understand far more than they have been able to show. I asked my speech therapist, who is also an AAC specialist, to please help me with building comprehension with my AAC users. She suggested that I use repeated book walks, and she even modeled for me how to do that over several speech therapy sessions. A book walk or picture walk is a powerful way to build comprehension for non-speaking, your minimally speaking, and your AAC users because it gives them access to meaning before the pressure of reading begins. When students preview the pictures, characters, settings, and key events, they start building background knowledge, making predictions, and connecting new information to what they already know. This reduces that language load, and it gives them a clear framework for understanding the text. For these learners, a picture walk also creates a supported way to participate. Instead of being expected to immediately answer abstract comprehension questions after reading, they can point, gesture, look, select symbols on their AAC device, or respond to simple guided prompts during the preview. It gives teachers a chance to model vocabulary, highlight important ideas, and make the story more understandable before the students are asked to process the full text. Most importantly, a book walk helps set students up for success. It makes the lesson more interactive. It lowers their anxiety, and it gives students multiple ways to show engagement and understanding. For many of these learners, comprehension improves when we make the meaning visible first. This is an actual book that I used in my guided reading session with her a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to show you some of the ideas that she gave me to walk through.

The book Jack and the Shack comes from Developing Decoders Set 3.

This goes along with my systematic approach to teaching phonics. It is going to cover special digraphs, ck, sh, and ch. It's also going to review short vowels.

But this book right here, Jack and the Shack, she started off by talking about, oh, what do you see on this cover? I see a— and we just kind of paused and allowed the student to say— a boy or a man. And what is he doing? It looks like he is running, and he's going very fast. So you can see I'm talking about— I'm using some core language, for example, man running fast. And then I'm going to say something about what I see up here because this is a main idea in the book. The house is on fire. It looks like a really small house, kind of like a shack. Let's check out and see what's happening. This book was written by Anna D'Aguilio, and illustrations are by Eva Elfimova. And we're gonna be looking at some /ak/ words, like jack and shack. Oh, now it looks like he's taking a nice, slow walk. Do you see where he's going?

He's walking through the—

what? Where is he at? Woods. And I would be pausing, allowing my students time to speak at this point, whether they are verbal or using their AAC device. I'm gonna be really focusing on simple words like walk and slow and woods because we're talking about the setting as well. I'm setting them up for understanding that. Oh, look, looks like he's getting ready to pack a snack. What kind of snack do you think that is? That looks like some, and there I go again pausing, cookies. Oh, he's putting them in his bag. Another name for a bag could be sack. So he's getting a snack and putting it in his sack. So, uh-oh, I see something black in the sky. Looks like there's going to be a problem here. Now, is he walking slow or is he walking fast? I think it looks like he's going fast now. I bet Jack is going to help. And look, there is a man in the back. He got out of the house. The house is on— pausing, allowing them time to speak— fire. But Jack is coming to help. Thankfully, Jack did help. He was able to get the old man out of the house. Jack helped the man. And look, he tugged the man. Look at him putting his arm around him. Let me show you how that would look. And then I actually did it with my student. I had my student get up, put his arm around me, and I tugged on him. To help him understand what it means to tug. Oh, we know about this. We learned about this in social studies. He called for help. What is he doing? He's calling a number. What number is that? And I had a student go to her AAC device and type in 9-1-1. And she's using a telephone, and he's using a telephone to call for help.

Who came to help?

It was the— and there I go again pausing, allowing them to say firefighter. And the firefighter drove a— pause again. My student was able to say fire truck. Do you think that he went fast or slow when the fire truck came?

I'm gonna give them opportunity to talk about some core vocabulary.

And what did he put on the house. And there we go, talking about water, bringing attention to the pictures, building that background knowledge and that comprehension. Uh, Jack did a good thing, didn't he?

He sure did a good job.

He helped save the man and the small house, the shack. So who are these characters? And I allowed the student to actually point to these two people. And I reinforce, "Yes, that's Jack and that's the old man." What was the problem in this story? Let's go back and find it. Hmm. Oh my! There's that problem.

Do you see?

The house is on fire. And then what was the solution? How did Jack help? Can you find how did he help?

And he could point to the picture and say, "Call 911." My speech therapist then asked me to take pictures of the main ideas, to print them, and then to allow the student time to sequence them.

What came first in the story?

And if she needed to, or he needed to, we could go right back to the book and look at the pictures to find what came first, and then what happened. We went through this process several days in a row. We started doing the reading and connecting the reading to the actual pictures so that the students could connect the text with the pictures. And when I started asking comprehension questions by the end of the week, I could see that my students were much more fluent in being able to either point to answers, use their AAC device to answer, or use one or two word answers orally. Comprehension work is not easy, but if we want to see our students develop into conventional readers, this is a key component to reading. To learn more about ways to meet the needs of your AAC users or students who are minimally speaking, check out more videos right here on the Autism Helpers YouTube channel.