Teaching moderately mentally retarded children basic reading skills

The present study assessed the efficacy of a program for teaching moderately mentally retarded children basic reading skills. Central to the program were the use of a phonemic alphabet as well as the application of pictorial cueing and stimulus manipulation techniques. The program consisted of six phases. It started with the training of graphemes for vowels (Phase 1) and ended with the training of two-syllable words (Phase 6). Four moderately mentally retarded students participated. Given time constraints, not all subjects completed all phases of the program. The training ended with the reading of one-syllable three letter words for one subject, one-syllable four letter words for two subjects, and two-syllable words for one subject. Subsequent generalization tests revealed that all subjects were capable of reading untrained words of the same complexity as those previously trained; and to read and, to a lesser extent, understand simple sentences. The execution of the program required an average training time of 35 hours per subject. Aspects pertaining to the validity of the program, the efficacy of the procedures, and the relevance of the learned skills are discussed.