Investigating Awareness of and Teaching Passage Organization in Learning Disabled Children

Abstract

This study explored sensitivity to passage organization and its importance in governing the ease of learning a passage in normally achieving and learning disabled children. The results indicated that normally achieving children were more aware of passage organization than learning disabled children. However, both groups focused on dimensions such as sentence length, decoding and vocabulary difficulty and informational load, rather than passage organization as determinants of task difficulty. Moreover, unlike normally achieving children, learning disabled children had substantial difficulties in reorganizing a disorganized passage. Through subsequent training, they learned to sort disorganized sentences into coherent clusters around respective subtopics, and appeared to understand what constitutes an organized paragraph within a passage.