Remedial Treatment of Text Comprehension: The Pilot Study in the 3rd– 4th-Grade Students with Specific Learning Disorder

Abstract

Children with specific learning disability who study in accordance with curriculum, struggle with text comprehension caused by limited cognitive and language skills. This evidence prompts for developing remedial treatment which would help the given clinical group to overcome difficulties in text comprehension. The current paper deals with an innovative methodology of remedial treatment developed and piloted with a small group of children. At the first stage of the study, 10 children (3rd grade students attending state primary school) with specific learning disability were selected for the research. Their skills in written narrative comprehension, oral narrative comprehension, as well as metalinguistic abilities, were scored. The main flaws, such as an inability to extract implicit information, to detect logical (temporal and causal) relations between the events, etc., were considered as the targets of the remedial treatment. At the second stage of the study, a half of the children were included into remedial treatment. Within the framework of the remedial treatment developed and provided by the author of the given paper, the children were taught to apply various reading strategies. After this, at the third stage of the study, all the children were tested again for the written narrative comprehension, oral narrative comprehension, and metalinguistic abilities. Results of the comparative analysis between the scores of the 1st and the 2nd test confirmed the remedial treatment was effective in improving comprehension of both oral and written narratives, as well as metalinguistic abilities.