Abstract
To develop a Speech-language Pathology (SLP) program and verify its effects on the reading comprehension of dyslexic students. Participants were eleven 4th and 5th-grade Elementary School students, eight boys and three girls, aged 9-11 years, diagnosed with developmental dyslexia. All individuals underwent the therapeutic program, which was composed of 16 sessions divided into four levels of complexity. A text adapted according to the Cloze technique and reading comprehension and orthography tasks were used in each session. The schoolchildren had their reading comprehension assessed pre- and post-program using a text available at the Test of Reading Comprehension of Expository Texts, adapted for application of the structural Cloze technique without support, according to the Evaluation of Reading Comprehension Levels. The participants showed better performance in reading comprehension at the post-program assessment not only in the filling of blanks in the text adapted according to the Cloze technique and in the Responses to Reading Comprehension Questions, but also in the level of reading comprehension achieved. The SLP program improved the reading comprehension performance and increased motivation to reading of dyslexic schoolchildren. Both the Cloze technique and the Reading Comprehension Questions were useful tools to develop and identify changes in the reading comprehension of the students assessed. This study is relevant because it prepared and verified the effects of a specific remediation program for schoolchildren with dyslexia by proposing the use of texts adapted according to the Cloze technique combined with other various tasks of reading comprehension and orthography.
Highlights
Reading comprehension is an interactive process in which the reader builds a mental representation about the meaning of the text read using cognitive strategies to deal with the information conveyed in the text and associating them with their previous knowledge[1,2].Reading processing has been studied for several decades, and various theoretical models have been proposed for this analysis, such as the Text Comprehension and Production model proposed by Kintsch and Van Dijk[1]
According to that author, reading comprehension can be observed at three different levels: 1- Literal Comprehension: the reader is able to understand the meaning of sentences or clauses, report what has been read, store specific details or facts, and answer questions related to explicit content; 2- Independent Comprehension: the reader is able to localize and establish relationships between the main and secondary ideas of the text, paraphrase the content read, activate previous knowledge, formulate predictions, hypotheses and inferences, establish analogies, and draw conclusions; 3- Critical Comprehension: the reader is able to analyze the accuracy of the information and the depth at which the theme was worked by the author, recognize ambiguities and confusion, and understand the pertinence of the conclusions
Significant difference was observed between the means of correct response percentages at the pre- and post‐program assessments (p=0.001), with higher means found at the post-program assessment
Summary
Reading processing has been studied for several decades, and various theoretical models have been proposed for this analysis, such as the Text Comprehension and Production model proposed by Kintsch and Van Dijk[1]. According to those authors, reading comprehension can occur in three different sets of operations: 1 - the first and most basic, the surface structure of the discourse, consists of the construction of the text microstructure. It is important to emphasize that the knowledge and previous experiences are specific to each individual, a fact that can influence the comprehension of the texts Castillo is another researcher who suggests the identification of reading comprehension levels[3]. According to that author, reading comprehension can be observed at three different levels: 1- Literal Comprehension: the reader is able to understand the meaning of sentences or clauses, report what has been read, store specific details or facts, and answer questions related to explicit content; 2- Independent Comprehension: the reader is able to localize and establish relationships between the main and secondary ideas of the text, paraphrase the content read, activate previous knowledge, formulate predictions, hypotheses and inferences, establish analogies, and draw conclusions; 3- Critical Comprehension: the reader is able to analyze the accuracy of the information and the depth at which the theme was worked by the author, recognize ambiguities and confusion, and understand the pertinence of the conclusions
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