Students with learning disabilities (LD) often have difficulty comprehending what they read. Although reading comprehension problems
frequently are associated with inadequate word recognition, students
also have difficulties related to comprehension itself--a passive approach to the reading task, insensitivity to text structure, and poor
metacognitive skills. The reading and language arts curricula that
have emergedfrom today's constructivist paradigm can pose problems
for these students. Whereas the new curricula emphasize personal interpretations of text and relatively unstructured teaching strategies,
students with LD do well with explicit, highly structured instruction.
This paper introduces an instructional program designed to teach students with serious learning disabilities how to identify a story theme,
and how to relate it to their own real-life experiences. The program focused on understanding a text as a whole, and integrating text meaning with concepts and experiences that are personally meaningful,
goals shared by a constructivist approach. At the same time, the program incorporates the explicit, structured instruction that these students also need. A study to evaluate the program's effectiveness is
described, as are current efforts to refine the program to promote
transfer ofcomprehension strategies