Reading Instruction for Students with Intellectual Disabilities

Comprehensive reading instruction for students with intellectual disabilities: Findings from the first three years of a longitudinal study. This longitudinal experimental study showed that students with intellectual disabilities can learn to read given consistent, explicit, and comprehensive reading instruction over an extended period of time. This article presented strategies for providing students with intellectual disabilities with intensive, explicit, systematic instruction to learn to read. The authors emphasized frequent progress monitoring to inform instruction. Evaluation of a phonological reading programme for children with Down syndrome. This article reported the results of a 10-week literacy program for children with Down syndrome who used a whole-word method to read. At the start of the study, participants demonstrated no apparent decoding skills. The literacy intervention included phonological awareness training, phonics, and whole word reading. All children showed significant improvement in word reading skill, alphabet knowledge and decoding with the majority retaining the gains three months after the program ended.