The Importance of Structured Text Talks for Students’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)...AbstractThe 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.Keywords: structured text talk, reciprocal teach- ing, inference training, reading comprehension, intellectual disabilityIntroductionGreat efforts have been made to improve the life quality and social inclusion of students with intellectual disability (ID). One important aspect of the social inclusion and quality of life is literacy (1, 2).Nevertheless, literacy has not been taken into account to any great extent to empower students with ID in Sweden. As demonstrated in a Swedish report, efforts to promote reading comprehension instruction have been limited. Instead,the social, emotional, and esthetical dimensions of education have had the highest priority (3). The report also critiqued that many teachers in special schools lacked appropriate qualifications such as formal training in special education.Research has demonstrated that reading in general and text comprehension in particular have been identified as challenging skills for students with ID, who usually do not achieve the level of their chronological and educational peers(4, 5). However, there is reason to believe that their cognitive potential is often seriously underestimated and that students with an ID may have the unexpected capacity to understand written text if they are given proper stimulation and instruction (2, 6, 7). Some of these researchers have used different instructional programmes in reading comprehension built within a sociocultural paradigm (8-10).Literature reviewTwo instructional programmes in reading comprehension have proven to be successful for readers with ID. The two programmes are reciprocal teaching (11) and inference training (12, 13).Reciprocal teaching(11) is a widely used technique for systematic text talks for promoting reading comprehension. Reciprocal teaching (RT) refers to an instructional activity that takes place in the form of a dialogue between teacher and students regarding segments of text. The teacher and students take turns assuming the role of teacher in leading this dialogue. RT is thus a group activity in which students read a passage of an expository text paragraph by paragraph. During the reading, the students acquire and practice four reading comprehension strategies:1. Prediction occurs when students hypothesise what the author will bring up next in the text. In order to do this successfully, students must activate the relevant background knowledge that they already possess regarding the topic. Furthermore, the opportunity has been created for the students to link the new knowledge they will encounter in the text with the knowledge they already possess.2. Generating questions. When students initiate questions, they first identify the kind of information that is significant enough to provide the substance for a question. Then, they pose this information in question form and self-test to make sure that they can indeed answer their own questions. …