Reading comprehension learning of a student with down syndrome: Analysis of one student's learning process from a socio-cultural approach

Abstract

The present study analyzed the interactions during reading lessons of a student with Down syndrome and moderate intellectual disabilities and his teacher, in order to consider their implications for teaching reading comprehension to students with Down syndrome more generally. The participant was a first-year junior high school student in a school for students with intellectual disabilities. After 8 lessons were videotaped, the videotapes were analyzed in terms of the student-teacher interactions after the teacher's inferential questions. Classroom discourse analysis was applied from the perspective of a socio-cultural approach. At the beginning of the 8 lessons, the student ignored the text in favor of his own knowledge. After half of the teaching unit, he became able to refer to the contents of the text. At that time, his knowledge functioned to support his inferences. The teacher followed up on the student's errors, refraining from evaluation, and requesting the roots of his interpretation. Gradually, the teacher increased the amount of information about the correct answers. This seemed to activate the student's mental functioning and to encourage him to develop his own reading strategies. These results suggest that analyses of how students with Down syndrome learn to read should focus on the changing processes when learning to read.