Teachers’ Strategies For Including Students With Autism Spectrum Disorders in Mainstream Classrooms: A Qualitative Study on Autistic Language Learners’ Reading Comprehension Skills

Students with autism spectrum disorders (asd) are increasingly attending mainstreamclassrooms. thus, teachers are required to use effective strategies to meet the needs of thesestudents in the learning environment. the aim of this paper was to explore effectivestrategies used by english language teachers in teaching english to learners with autism inorder to enhance their reading comprehension skills. this qualitative study drew on apurposive sample of 16 teachers, who deal with autistic learners in mainstream classrooms.and addressed four middle schools, where autistic students attended mainstream classesthe participants were ten male and six female teachers aged 30-38 years and had at leastfive years' experience in teaching students with autism in the mainstream classrooms. datawas collected through the use of interviews and observations. the analysis of thequalitative data using content analysis revealed that the majority of the participants referredto three important macro-strategies, including priming, prompt delivery, and visualschedules. in fact, findings of the study were in agreement with effective autism inclusionmethods proposed by crosland and dunlap in 2012, although there existed slightdifferences considering the context in which the present study was conducted. the findingsof this study redound to the benefit of english language teachers and autistic languagelearners as they shed some light on the strategies that can be effective in including autistic.learners in the mainstream discourse by enhancing their reading comprehension skills.theoretical and pedagogical implication of the study are further discussed in the paper.