Reading and Students with Intellectual Disabilities: Using the Readers Workshop Model to Provide Balanced Literacy Instruction

The purpose of this paper is to explain how reading skills benefit students with intellectual disabilities in multiple areas of their lives and to propose that Readers Workshop, a model used in many educational settings, may also be used in literacy instruction for students with intellectual disabilities. The major topics that will be addressed include the importance of reading for students with intellectual disabilities, historical approaches to teaching reading to students with intellectual disabilities, and an overview of reading instructional methods. Readers Workshop is described as it is commonly used in general education classrooms and benefits of using this model to improve literacy instruction for students with intellectual disabilities are suggested. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the author’s experiences in a classroom using the Readers Workshop model with students with intellectual disabilities and recommendations for additional research needed to design comprehensive programs for literacy 3 instruction for all students