Improving the comprehension of disabled readers

Students with learning disabilities (LD) often have difficulty comprehendin g what they read. Although reading comprehension problems frequently are as sociated with inadequate word recognition, students also have difficulties related to comprehension itself-a passive approach to the reading task, ins ensitivity to text structure, and poor metacognitive skills. The reading an d language arts curricula that have emerged from today's constructivist par adigm can pose problems for these students. Whereas the new curricula empha size personal interpretations of text and relatively unstructured teaching strategies, students with LD do well with explicit, highly structured instr uction. This paper introduces an instructional program designed to teach st udents with serious learning disabilities how to identify a story theme, an d how to relate it to their own real-life experiences. The program focused on understanding a text as a whole, and integrating text meaning with conce pts and experiences that are personally meaningful, goals shared by a const ructivist approach. At the same time, the program incorporates the explicit , structured instruction that these students also need. A study to evaluate the program's effectiveness is described, as are current efforts to refine the program to promote transfer of comprehension strategies.