Efficacy of Reading Strategies for Female School Age Children: Typical Children Versus Children with Mental Handicap

The purpose of this study was to compare the performance of typical female students and students with mental retardation on three approaches of teaching reading comprehension. These teaching approaches were a conventional teaching method, a modified version of reciprocal teaching, and a key word strategy. Two groups of Emirati students were recruited: Group 1 (24 typical female, age range= 7.8-12 years) and Group 2 (12 students with mental handicap, age range= 11-18 years). Detailed procedures were outlined beforehand and implemented by the teachers. Statistical analyses (MANOVA) revealed that there were significant differences in group 1 students’ achievement on the three teaching methods, F(2,46) = 18.37, P .001.The Tukey (HSD) follow-up procedure revealed that there were significant differences at the .05 level between students’ performance on method 1 (the conventional teaching method) and their performance on method 2 (the reciprocal teaching method) and method 3 (the key word strategy); however, the Tukey test did not reveal a significant difference between students’ performance on method 2 and their performance on method 3. The MANOVA revealed that there were no significant differences in group 2 (students with mental handicap) students’ achievement on the three teaching methods F (2,22) = 1.99, p .160. That is, the apparent differences in students’ achievement are not large enough to yield statistically significant differences. This means that the modified reciprocal Efficacy of Reading Strategies for Female School Age Children: Typical Children Versus Children with Mental Handicap (1-20) 2 University of Sharjah Journal for Humanities Social Sciences, Volume 12, No. 2 December 2015 teaching and the key word strategy were more effective in enhancing typical students’ achievement than the conventional teaching method. The analyses, however, did not produce significant differences between the modified reciprocal teaching and the key word strategy. As for students with mental retardation, the statistical analysis revealed no significant differences in student’s performance among the three strategies. However, a trend was obvious that the modified reciprocal teaching method appears to be more effective than the other two in enhancing students’ comprehension achievement. Suggestions for future research are discussed.