Special Education Teachers’ Perception of Teaching Reading Comprehension to School-Age Children With Autism: A Qualitative Approach

Abstract

One of the basic areas of language difficulty for many primary school-age children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is reading comprehension (RC). Most children with ASD face challenges and exhibit deficiency in comprehending and processing information in the typical form. Those challenges and difficulties are not only encountered by the children with ASD during their learning process, but also by the special education teachers during their teaching process. Such struggles, with their possible resolutions, have not yet been addressed pedagogically by the Iraqi Special Education Department. The current study attempts to depict the real context of the teaching practices of RC to ASD children in the views of the special education class teachers. A qualitative approach has been utilized for data collection and analysis using a questionnaire technique and a thematic analysis method to gain deeper understanding of such an educational context. Thirty-one special education class teachers in Basrah formal primary schools volunteered to answer the online questionnaire which involves twenty questions of various types. Seven patterns of concepts have been gleaned from the data collected, thematically analyzed and discussed. The study has come out with a number of findings, conclusions, and recommendations.