Reading comprehension in students with mild intellectual disabilities and the use of context

People with mild intellectual disabilities face lack of skills and difficulties on all areas of development due to lowered general intellectual abilities. In our master's thesis we focus on reading literacy of students with mild intellectual disabilities who attend the adaptive educational programme. Compared to students of typical development the reading development of students with mild intellectual disabilities is slower but follows a similar pattern. The reading progress is slower and less distinct compared to the reading progress of students of typical development. At the moment there are only a few studies in our area which investigate the literacy of students who attend the adaptive educational programme and their achievements at the end of the schooling programme. A Slovenian study on reading literacy of students with mild intellectual disabilities who attend vocational programmes reports that students have difficulties understanding textbook materials mostly because they lack text and word understanding. This affects the general success in all educational subjects. Students with mild intellectual disabilities are more successful at listening comprehension in comparison to reading on their own. All of the above mentioned suggests that poor reading technique is an obstacle students face while reaching their actual reading potential. But because other factors are important for reading comprehension, such as the use of context, integration of previous knowledge with what is being read and the capability of controlling one's reading comprehension, we can assume that the problem with students' achievements lies not only in the reading fluency but in the reading strategies themselves. The results of this research can be generalised on students with mild intellectual disabilities. Since students use texts for acquiring new information while studying for almost all educational subjects it is of great importance that they develop good reading strategies; the use of the strategies distincts the good and poor readers is after the reading technique has been acquired. This master's thesis purpose is to examine how successful the higher grade students who attend the adaptive educational programme are at using the strategy of deriving unknown word meaning from context independently and when guided. At the same time we will be given an insight into the success and meaning of explicit teaching of the above mentioned reading strategy. With the data and existing literature are able to form some guidelines and suggestions for the reading lessons. For the purpose of the study we ourselves formed a research instrument. The study includes 29 students from the central Slovenian region