‘I liked the text about the little bird.’ Five intellectually disabled persons talk about texts

The aim of this pilot study was to investigate if Reciprocal Teaching (RT) could scaffold the active reading of adults with intellectual disabilities. A study was performed with a group of five intellectually disabled participants, aged 28–42 years. The participants were able to decode words but they read very slowly and in an uncritical way. The participants were exposed to a programme for reading strategies instruction, Reciprocal Teaching. This programme is influenced by the concept of scaffolding, which is an application of Vygotsky's theory of the importance of interplay between support and challenge for development. In RT the text is read paragraph by paragraph. During the reading four reading comprehension strategies are practised: generating questions, summarizing, clarifying word meanings or confusing text, and predicting what might occur in the next paragraph. To start with, the participants (a) did not like the idea of text talks (b) did not like stopping to discuss after each paragraph (c) had a tendency to drift away from the text. However, after a few text talks they became familiar with the idea of text talks and the four strategies. The participants appreciated the text talks and said that they wanted to continue with them.