An Intervention Research Of Text Structure Instruction On Expository Texts Comprehension Skills Of Children With Mild Intellectual Disabilities

Reading is an important way for individuals to effectively acquire knowledge and information,and can facilitate the development of adaptive behaviors such as communication,life skills,and socialization.However,due to limitations in working memory and attention,children with intellectual disabilities have difficulties in reading comprehension,such as a lack of awareness of text structure,difficulty in extracting key information,and inability to effectively link the main idea of the text and construct meaningful mental representations.Previous studies have mainly used reciprocal teaching and paraphrasing strategies to intervene in reading comprehension skills of children with intellectual disabilities in expository texts,more in continuation of teaching narrative texts and less in combination with the textual features of expository texts.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct further research on interventions for children with intellectual disabilities’ reading comprehension skills on expository texts in order to explore effective intervention methods.Based on theories such as the construction-integration model,text structure instruction explicitly teaches knowledge of text structure while visually presenting the main idea of the text with the help of graphic organizers,which can develop plans and provide effective information segmentation strategies for children to complete reading tasks,promoting the rational allocation of children’s attention,reducing the demands on working memory,and releasing cognitive resources to focus on text comprehension.Text structure instruction has been widely used as an effective instructional strategy to enhance reading comprehension in children with reading difficulties.Therefore,this study explores the intervention effect and generalization effect of text structure instruction on the reading comprehension skills of children with mild intellectual disabilities.This study adopts a multiple baseline across participants design of single-case experimental methodology,with text structure instruction as the independent variable and reading comprehension ability as the dependent variable.The researcher collects and adapts expository texts that meet the reading comprehension level of children with mild intellectual disabilities,taking into account their reading interests and life needs,and conducts an intervention experiment with three children with mild intellectual disabilities.The experiment was divided into the baseline,intervention and generalization period.According to the teaching purpose,the intervention was implemented in three phases:text instruction,guided practice and worked independently.Two months after the end of the intervention period,an assessment of generalization with living materials was administered to explore the generalization effect of text structure instruction on the reading comprehension ability in children with intellectual disabilities.At the end of the experiment,data collected by single-subject research designs is analyzed through the visual analysis and calculation of Tau-U effect values,the study obtained the following results:First,text structure instruction can effectively improve the reading comprehension of expository texts of children with mild intellectual disabilities with positive immediate effect and generalization effect.Second,text structure instruction had great intervention and generalization effects on all dimensions of children with mild intellectual disabilities’ expository reading comprehension,with the intervention effect of literal comprehension being better than that of inferential comprehension.Based on the above findings,the following suggestions are made for the teaching practices of using text structure instruction to enhance the reading comprehension of children with intellectual disabilities in expository texts: providing visual support based on computer-assisted technology to mobilize learning interest through multisensory stimulation and increase children’s classroom participation,embedding meta-cognitive strategies in the reading comprehension process to help children plan,regulate,and monitor the comprehension process and develop metacognitive reading comprehension skills,and developing easy-read living texts that provide opportunities for children to access accessible information and promote life-reading.