Teaching Silent-'e' Words to Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

The literature on reading in persons with intellectual disabilities (ID) contains little guidance for teaching word-attack skills, particularly for word patterns beyond consonant-vowel-consonant words (CVC). One approach involves incorporating spelling and matrix training to facilitate development of the alphabetic principle, which denotes phoneme-grapheme relations that generalize across words. Our previous studies have demonstrated recombinative generalization of onset and rime units within CVC words following computerized matrix training where participants learned to construct words on the computer. The present study extends this work to CVC and CVCe (i.e., silent-`e') words. In this study, words were not constructed letter-by-letter, but by making only two selections: onset and rime. Participants were three adults with high-moderate ID and minimal reading skills. All participants demonstrated recombinative generalization within a rime set (e.g., learning to spell some at/ate words resulted in spelling untaught at/ate words). Secondary measures of emergent reading and written spelling showed that the computerized task resulted in both these untrained modalities. Thus, the procedures proved effective in producing the alphabetic principle and untrained reading and spelling.