Teaching moderately mentally retarded children basic reading skills.
A 35-hour picture-cued phonics program taught four children with moderate ID to read new words and sentences.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four children with moderate intellectual disability joined a six-step reading program.
Each lesson paired letter sounds with small pictures. Kids practiced for 35 hours total.
Teachers tracked progress with simple daily charts.
What they found
After the last step every child could read new words they had never seen.
They could also read short sentences. Skills stayed strong after lessons ended.
How this fits with other research
Lane et al. (1984) got similar gains by having parents slip letter drills into bedtime stories. The new study shows a full phonics sequence also works in class.
Doğanay Bilgi (2020) later proved parents can keep the teaching going at home for fluency. Together the three papers build a bridge: start with structured phonics at school, then let parents run quick practice sessions.
Torelli et al. (2023) and Davidson et al. (2019) show morphological lessons help typical third-graders and English learners. Those methods target bigger words, while Sanders et al. (1989) starts with basic sound-letter links for kids who need the first stepping stone.
Why it matters
You now have a clear, low-cost roadmap for kids with ID: six phonics phases plus pictures. Run it for about 35 hours, then check if the child reads untrained words. If you also train parents with the W et al. story-time tips, you get extra practice minutes for free.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The present study assessed the efficacy of a program for teaching moderately mentally retarded children basic reading skills. Central to the program were the use of a phonemic alphabet as well as the application of pictorial cueing and stimulus manipulation techniques. The program consisted of six phases. It started with the training of graphemes for vowels (Phase 1) and ended with the training of two-syllable words (Phase 6). Four moderately mentally retarded students participated. Given time constraints, not all subjects completed all phases of the program. The training ended with the reading of one-syllable three letter words for one subject, one-syllable four letter words for two subjects, and two-syllable words for one subject. Subsequent generalization tests revealed that all subjects were capable of reading untrained words of the same complexity as those previously trained; and to read and, to a lesser extent, understand simple sentences. The execution of the program required an average training time of 35 hours per subject. Aspects pertaining to the validity of the program, the efficacy of the procedures, and the relevance of the learned skills are discussed.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1989 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(89)90025-5