Teaching Students With Severe Speech and Physical Impairments a Decoding Strategy Using Internal Speech and Motoric Indicators

Children who have severe speech and physical impairments often have difficulty acquiring literacy skills. One critical area of literacy instruction involves promoting word identification though the development of decoding strategies that can be implemented by students independently. This study investigated teaching four students who have cerebral palsy and dysarthric speech to internalize the three-step decoding strategy found in the Nonverbal Reading Approach, as demonstrated by motoric indicators (individualized motor movements that parallel the decoding steps). The results of this study indicate that students are able to learn the three-step decoding strategy with the addition of a motoric indicator to identify words in isolation, as well as to apply the strategy independently upon encountering unknown words in connected text.