Practitioners are increasingly expected to provide reading instruction to students with intellectual disabilities to help them become literate. Whereas explicit, systematic reading instruction is effective at preventing reading difficulties for most young children, its effectiveness for children with intellectual disabilities remains unclear. The…

An alternating treatments design was used to investigate the effects of three types of opportunities to respond (i.e., individual, choral, and mixed responding) on sight words and syllable practice in six elementary students with behavioral problems. During the mixed responding condition, five out of six students demonstrated a lower rate of…

The purpose of this study was to measure the effects of reading racetrack and flashcards when teaching phonics, sight words, and addition facts. The participants for the sight word and phonics portion of this study were two seven-year-old boys in the second grade. Both participants were diagnosed with a learning disability. The third participant…

To learn and master new concepts, including the acquisition of new vocabulary, students must be able to sustain attention during direct instruction, stay focused throughout the guided practice activity, and successfully complete the independent practice assignments. Yet, difficulty with maintaining attention is a common characteristic for students…

This study compared the effectiveness of SMART Board, interactive whiteboard technology and traditional flash cards in teaching reading in a small-group instructional arrangement. Three students with moderate intellectual disabilities were taught to read grocery store aisle marker words under each condition. Observational learning (students…

Research suggests that parent involvement improves academic achievement, but in the busy world in which we live it is often difficult to promote. Many researchers suggest that successful programs value parents' limited time constraints, diversity of literacy skills, and availability of materials. The Great Poetry Race provides an easy vehicle to…

A review of the literature was conducted for articles published between 1975 and 2007 on the application of time delay as an instructional procedure to teach word and picture recognition to students with severe developmental disabilities in an effort to evaluate time delay as an evidence-based practice. A total of 30 experiments were analyzed…

This paper presents a concise model of literacy assessment based on the "simple view of reading" and the "simple view of writing". The approach targets directly the key skills and knowledge involved in reading, writing and spelling. It stands in contrast to the less precise and potentially more subjective "always-in-context" and "always-authentic"…

Cognitive, word-level reading, spelling and writing measures were administered to academically at-risk undergraduates with writing difficulties to examine their literacy profiles; and performance was compared to typically-achieving writers. The at-risk students were slower and less accurate on measures of sight word reading, lexical decision,…

Difficulties with spelling can impact students' reading acquisition and writing, having a critical impact on overall literacy development. Students with learning disabilities (LD) often struggle with spelling. We describe a case study with three elementary-aged students with LD using a mnemonic approach to spelling sight words. Our approach,…

Several decades of research have established the critical role of phonemic awareness in the development of beginning reading. In particular, phonemic awareness makes early phonics instruction useful for children and facilitates their ability to blend letter sounds while decoding words, to learn sight words reliably, and to spell phonetically. A…

In this investigation, the acquisition of both functional and core content sight words was compared as replicated across three formats: direct massed trial instruction in a special education resource room, direct distributed trial instruction in a general education classroom, and embedded distributed trial instruction in a general education…

Reading fluency is the ability to read orally with speed and efficiency, including word recognition, decoding, and comprehension (Chard & Pikulski, 2005). Able readers achieve fluency as they recognize words with speed and build upon them to aid in comprehension (Pumfrey & Elliott, 1990). One way to help students achieve fluency is through the use…

Due to the role language and literature play in the construction of social, economic and cultural systems, reading comprehension has become a growing challenge. This study examined how the relationship between English as a foreign language reading comprehension and life experiences while using the "Sight Word Strategy" could prove…

The effectiveness of within-session and across-session variations of a progressive time delay procedure for teaching sight words was evaluated for five participants with cognitive delays. Participants were exposed to five target stimuli using two variations of progressive time delay procedures in an alternating treatments design, followed by the…