The efficacy of reciprocal teaching in fostering the reading literacy of students with intellectual disabilities

The purpose of this study was to investigate theeffects of strategy instruction on the reading literacy of students with mildand moderate intellectual disability. Students aged 15-21 with intellectualdisability (<xh:i>n</xh:i> = 35) participated in 24 sessions ofliteracy strategy instruction (experimental condition) or remedialliteracy-skill acquisition- lessons (control condition). The main objective ofstrategy instruction was to foster comprehension monitoring. Through shareddialogues, students were trained to generate questions about text, to summarisewhat was read, to clarify difficult words and to make predictions. Thestrategies were taught using the reciprocal teaching method developed byPalincsar and Brown. This method involves provision of support adjusted to students' difficultiesand peer teaching of strategies. Control subjects were exposed to directinstruction of basic reading skills that were presented sequentially andpracticed solitarily by the students. Opportunities were given to respond toquestions and to summarise but no strategy instruction was provided to fostercomprehension monitoring. Two different measures of comprehension and a measureof strategy use were administered to test for variation across differentmethods of instruction. Findings on all measures provide support for the claimthat strategy instruction is indeed superior to traditional remedial methods ofskill acquisition in fostering reading literacy comprehension. These findings challengethe common perception that literacy is an organic impossibility for peopledefined as intellectually disabled. Moreover, the results add to recentresearch in sociocognitive instruction that supports the need to modifyprevailing methods of reading curriculum and suggests a reconceptualisation ofthe comprehension process and its instruction to students with intellectualdisabilities