Reading Disabilities and Intervention: An Action Research

Abstract

This study contains practices and evaluations that were made to solve the reading and comprehension problems of a seventh-grade student who has reading disability. In this study, the action research, which was one of the qualitative research methods, was used. In the research, firstly the student's reading errors and its reasons, and in the sequel, the methods and the texts which were used to solve this faults were determined. "Error Analysis Inventory" was used for evaluation of the reading and comprehension errors. A twelve-week study program was carried out with the student. The process was tried to be managed based on an 'easy to difficult' principle to solve the student's fear of reading and failure anxiety. The materials were prepared by considering the textual criteria and readability score of the text. Firstly it was studied accompanied with syllable groups, rhymes and poems, after that the chosen texts were used by classification according to Atesman (1997) formula. In the last four weeks of the study, the children literature opuses which were chosen according to the student's level were given as homework. The studies to solve reading fluency problems were carried out with repetitive reading, model reading, assisted reading, echo and choir reading methods. The student, which was in the anxiety level according to the result of the pretest before the program, reached the instructional level according to the result of posttest after the program.