Reading Comprehension Troubles

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Hello WP!!

I really hope this is in the correct forum (I'm new, so feel free to be my friend ), but I was looking through a few pages and was looking to see if there was a topic on reading comprehension. I couldn't find one, so...anyway...

This is one of those skills that I have a very hard time with. I'm currently taking classes to start my career in the IT industry. I've finished my A+ class and have earned my certification by some miracle. I took my Microsoft MCITP (servers/sys admin) class twice and I have yet to take an exam for that. I've been studying for almost a year, but I just can't comprehend what I'm reading. During class, I understand what my teacher is lecturing about because he makes lots of diagrams and I'm a very good visual learner. I also fly through labs in class because I have an easy time with instructions, as long as they're all written down for me. The problem is that, while my teacher shows us and has us perform the stuff we'll do on an every day basis and even some of the more advanced stuff, the certification exams are all very wordy and the sentences lose meaning on me.

Now I'm not bad in vocabulary. Actually, I'd like to think I have quite an extensive vocabulary and enjoy looking up the meaning to words that I don't know. I looked into this problem more and what I learned seems to hold true to my situation. The more clauses, verbs, adjectives, or subjects in a sentence, the less I can understand. I'm going to paraphrase from the article I read. Basically, when you read a sentence, you're brain needs to:

- Process the first part of the sentence
- Hold it in memory
- Process the second part of the sentence
- Process the relationship between the first and second part of the sentence

As someone with Asperger's, it takes me a longer time to process information, so I have to read the sentence over and over again. A lot of times I still don't the meaning. It does make me feel dumb on occasion. On a side note, my Dr. made a good analogy for me: I have a great hard drive, but my RAM and processor suck . What's really odd is that, for the most part, I'm able to type/write my thoughts in a coherent manner (my grammar is a bit off as my best friend is always pointing out).

I'm starting my next classes in January (Cisco) and I'm worried that I'll have let my teacher down by not having earned any of the six Microsoft certifications. I hope there are some people here who have overcome this situation or are dealing with it and would like to discuss it with me. Cheers!

I have reading comprehension problems too, although I read very quickly. Common sense says to slow down but I get distracted when I try. I have a book about being right brained in a left brain world, the author suggests reading every sentence 3 times.

You seem to be the opposite of me, Aimless. The way my doctor describe my brain, my right side is weaker. Does the reading 3 times thing work for you because I still have a bit of trouble, even after repetition. Do you have an easy time with simple sentences like "X does Y" in comparison to a more difficult sentence like "X did Y because X felt that Z was also something something"?

I'm finding that my 4th grader is having the same issues. He is a very intelligent visual learner, and he has no trouble reading textbooks and passing tests with flying colors, but when he was tasked with his first book report of a fiction novel he couldn't do it. He read the book, he read it to me, but asking him what the story was about was a whole different thing. He understands the words, but the more descriptive the language, the longer the sentence, the more he loses. He can tell me facts about where they are and what the things are around them and who the characters are, but to get out of him what the story was about was impossible.

I think if you are a visual learner you have to see what you are learning in some fashion before you read about it, so words elude you because the don't paint a picture and you don't have something visual to attach that to. I think my son lacks the imagination to interpret what he's reading so I have to do it for him for this very reason. He is also a black and white thinker too, so that makes it more difficult.

Don't feel dumb. I never realized how difficult language is until I watched my son struggle to learn it, and still struggle to use it. I can read and write until the cows come home, but my son is way, way smarter than I am. Language is natural for me, not for him but he's the one with the smarts.

I'm really interested in what other say about this. I am just now realizing this about my son and I would love to understand it better so I can help him.

I do too, sometimes it helps to really focus on it. when necessary I will try to read a page for about an hour or two really trying to remember word for word or major points in it.

@MommyJones

What your son is going through is exactly how I'm feeling. He's lucky to have been diagnosed so early. It's good to know there's someone else having the exact same problem I am. Makes me feel a little less alone in this.

Oh, I've never really tried the 3 times thing. I have much more trouble with complex sentences. I tend to read more fiction than non fiction and I can create a visual background of the story line and the character's personalities and what I read just sort of flows in there. I don't retain details of what I've read after some time has passed since I read the book. My working memory is really bad for reading non fiction. It is a treasure when I can find a writer who can write about a non fiction subject in such a way as to hold my interest. It's not the subject I'm uninterested in you know. I am a very visual learner. Written instructions tend to confuse me because I will always second guess the meaning. There are things I can't understand verbally that I see and then get right away.
My son with AS has always lagged behind in reading comprehension and has little interest in fiction. He reads and remembers facts about his special interest and in that way he surpasses me.

Something is not quite right about my reading skills. Right now, the bulk of my classes involve very heavy reading. Literature with plot developments that are difficult to understand, philosophical theories expressed by the author through the characters that seem ungraspable, and generally incredibly small font (equivalent to 10 pt. if I were to estimate). I get bogged down way too easily when I'm reading and become easily discouraged when I can't grasp something or understand an interaction between two characters. I'm finding that I can quickly call to mind the whats of whatever I'm reading but don't understand the whys, if that makes sense. I can't describe the difficulty I face when asked to write a paper several pages long about a 300-400 page book, or to summarize a 50-75 page chunk of a certain episode of a book. It's so unbearably suffocating that I nearly give up. For example, if we were asked to summarize something we've read and we were given a guideline to make it about 1-1.5 pages double spaced, mine would probably turn out to be 3-4 pages. I hope you are able to find some meaning and take something away from what I've written, it's not easy for me to articulate this.

Thank you for sharing this! I feel so bad for him because he really tries, and it's making him feel stupid and he's not. Is there anything that helped you with this through school? I'm more than willing to read the books first and help him through it in any way I can. My son was so discouraged by this book report he won't read any fiction for me at all and I would like to try to bring him back around somehow. I can't imagine how he's going to get through Shakespeare...watch the movie I guess

This makes more sense than you can imagine. I think I've mentioned this, but I'm in IT, currently just a computer tech, but I'm working on higher level classes right now. Anyway, I could tell you what a processor does, but if you asked me why it does it, I'd be like:



So you're definitely not alone here. From what I'm gathering is that you also have trouble putting your thoughts down when you're asked to write something specific. Also, you articulate what you're thinking fine. I understood your thoughts perfectly. I have a similar issue because I can't explain what I've read, I just know some of the information. On the other hand, I'm able to write out my thoughts into coherent sentences (right? RIGHT?! ).

If you want to know what I've been doing to try and help myself, I'd be more than happy to share with you. I just don't like giving advice that's not asked for. Take care!

You've probably heard this before many times, but the only real solution to this problem is to read often. AS or not, reading comprehension is difficult if you're not a big reader.

My son doesn't have reading comprehension problems necessarily, he has trouble making inferences from language that is descriptive and that I think this is the biggest problem. He has this issue with spoken language as well. He also focuses on the details and misses the big picture. I think that if he didn't have trouble in those areas he would get more out of what he is reading. I believe my challenge is working around THAT. I think you're right in that the more you read the better you get, but I think for some it's way more complicated than that.

This is the part that is hard for some people to understand. It's not that we don't know how to read, it's that our brains can't process the relationships. Just reading and reading doesn't help. I mean it could, but for some of us it doesn't.

MommyJones, I sent you a PM

I just finished my reply

This sounds exactly like me. I feel ret*d around my peers. A lot of people say it's hard for them to learn by just reading, but it seems like they have no idea how much I struggle sometimes. I can read a page over and over and not take anything in at all. This happened a lot in high school with history books and classic novels. I played it off as me being lazy and thought somehow if I really tried and wanted to that I could learn the material. It never occurred to me that I had any sort of disability. After all I could excel in some classes and do horrible in others.

Is that an Aspie thing or is it more of an ADD thing? I'm thinking AS with AD(H)D is going to present very differently than just AS. I don't know for sure though. I am the same with non fiction, i have to re read sentences. With fiction I just go with the flow and don't worry about the details.