Interactive Teaching: An Effective Way to Teach Revision Skills to Adolescents with Learning Disabilities

Abstract

This paper reports two studies in writing instruction, in which the focus was on investigating the efficacy of an interactive teaching approach in teaching adolescents with learning disabilities revision skills. The instructional foci were clarity and thematic salience in writing reportive essays. Study 1 involved five adolescent males with learning disabilities while Study II, a replication study, involved four adolescent males and two adolescent females with learning disabilities. The results from Study I indicated that through the experimenter-teacher's instructional dialogues, the adolescents learned to identify ambiguities in their essays and to make their writing themes salient. The results of Study II replicated those in Study I and undergirded the efficacy of the interactive teaching approach in teaching adolescents with learning disabilities revision skills. However, students in both studies indicated that they required more training in the ability to predict which parts of their essays would stymie readers' comprehension. The same applies to their ability to revise their writings independently. The paper concludes with an analysis of the efficacy of the interactive teaching approach to teaching adolescents with learning disabilities revision skills. Limitations of the studies were considered with accompanying suggestions for future research.