Literacy among Canadian students with disabilities : National Strategy for Early Literacy

The author would also like to thank the Ontario Ministry of Education for its financial support in the development of this paper and the Canadian Council on Learning for financial support and research on literacy for the NSEL initiative. [...] It is important to match the difficulty of tasks to students’ level of ability to ensure the tasks are difficult enough to challenge and engage students but not so difficult that students are unable to succeed. [...] Similarly, Lesaux and Siegel (2003) have shown that providing phonological awareness training to all Kindergarteners and phonics instruction to all first graders effectively and substantially reduces the incidence of reading disability by the end of Grade 2. Lesaux and Siegel found that 24% of English speaking children and 37% of children for whom English was a second language were at risk for rea [...] Gajria, Jitendra, Sood, and Sacks (2007) synthesized the research on different types of interventions designed to assist students with learning disabilities in developing the reading comprehension skills necessary to successfully negotiate the demands of expository text. [...] Students with emotional and behavioural disorders While students with learning disabilities are the largest of any group of students with disabilities, students with emotional or behavioural disorders endure the worst educational outcomes (Maccini, Gagnon, & Hughes, 2002).