THE IMPORTANCE OF STRUCTURED TEXT TALKS FOR STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION

AN INTERVENTION STUDY IN SPECIAL SCHOOLS

Abstract

The present intervention study reveals that students diagnosed with an intellectual disability (ID) are able to construct meaning from written expository text through guided social interaction. There were 31 students recruited from four special schools participating in this intervention study.The study involves a pre-test phase and a post-test phase. The students were divided into two intervention conditions: (a) reciprocal teaching (RT), which involved practice in four reading strategies—prediction, question generating, clarification, and summarisation—and (b) inference training (IT), which involved practice in answering inference questions, i.e., where you have to read between the lines to find the answer. The training included 16 sessions over 8 weeks. Pre- testing and post-testing included seven tests. Improvement of test results was obtained in both conditions to about the same extent, indicating that both conditions were beneficial.