A significant number of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) who attend partially or fully integrated classrooms in the United States in increasing numbers, show distinctive difficulties in reading comprehension and difficulty acquiring the foundational oral language skills necessary for reading development. In this paper we describe a Student Shadowing Project in which preservice teachers observed and reported on opportunities for students with special needs to participate and engage in classroom literacy practices. Results revealed that students with ASD were given few opportunities to actively engage in classroom dialogue and academic language (defined here as the language of school, testing, and textbooks) production. Given that gaining meaning from print is largely dependent on a child's proficiency in language, we suggest that teachers increasingly include students with ASD in whole-class and small-group interactions, to facilitate the development of language skills which may in turn lead to reading comprehension improvements.