Preteaching Words to Facilitate an Instructional Level in Reading with a Student with a Specific Learning Disability in Reading

An appropriate level of challenge for reading, called the instructional level, consists of 93% to 97% known words within the text. The current study examined if an instructional level could be facilitated by preteaching words to a male second grade student identified with a learning disability in reading. Key and high-frequency words were pretaught before reading passages, which made up the experimental condition in a single-subject reversal design. A baseline condition was also used in which the child read from similar passages without preteaching words. Results suggested that preteaching the words led to a percentage of known words that fell within the instructional level, and increased fluent reading of the experimental passages. Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are included.