Acquisition of literacy skills by children with severe disability

Many students with autism, intellectual impairment, and multiple impairments experience difficulties in acquiring literacy skills. An intervention programme based on the multimedia software Delta Messages and a scaffolding approach was used with severely disabled children. They showed significant gains in sentence production through a whole-word selection strategy, which was targeted in the programme, and in the ability to synthesise and spell words, tasks that were not targeted in the reading instruction. This suggests that massed practice of self-initiated and meaningful literacy activities can promote the acquisition of literacy by students with severe disabilities and limited written language skills.