Practitioners are increasingly expected to provide reading instruction to students with cognitive disabilities to help them become literate. Whereas a phonics-based approach to reading instruction is regarded as a best practice for most young children, its effectiveness for children with cognitive disabilities is unclear. The purpose of this study was to explore this issue for a sample of 24 children with Down syndrome (DS) between the ages of 7 and 16 years. More specifically, the studys purpose was to explore the effectiveness of phonics-based instruction for children with DS and to model individual childrens reading growth to identify specific child characteristics predictive of this growth. Results indicate that a majority of children demonstrated statistically significant growth in letter sounds, and reading of taught sight words and decodable words. Children with DS who entered the study with more advanced word identification skills made greater gains in decodable word reading; those with more advanced phoneme segmentation skills made greater gains in nonsense word reading. Overall, findings support inclusion of phonics-based reading instruction into academic programs for children with DS.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-09142008-124858 |
| Date | 30 September 2008 |
| Creators | Lemons, Christopher Jay |
| Contributors | Douglas Fuchs |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-09142008-124858/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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