Practices and problems encountered by special education teachers when teaching reading and writing to students with intellectual disabilities

The purpose of this study is to examine the practices of special education teachers in the literacy teaching process to students with mild, moderate, severe intellectual disability (ID). In this context, the research has been conducted on literacy preparation activities, teaching methods used, assessment techniques, materials, implementation practices during instruction, and problems encountered in the process related to literacy readiness. This study is survey research. The participants of the study are 271 special education teachers working in Adıyaman, Batman, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, and Mardin cities. The data collection tool is a survey. Most of the data has been collected through printed forms on paper, and a small part has been collected through Google Forms. The data gathered in the study were analyzed descriptively using the SPSS program. The findings are presented in cross-tables. Some of the findings obtained after performing the data analyses are in the following. Special education teachers give importance to improving the fine motor skills and perception levels of their students with ID before literacy teaching. In addition to using mostly sound-based sentence methods, special education teachers use different literacy teaching methods. Functional literacy teaching is used by very few of the participating special education teachers. First reading and writing books are frequently used while teaching reading and writing in special education classes. It was found that unsystematic techniques were mostly used in assessing students with IDs. Leading problems found in relation to literacy teaching to students with ID were inadequacy of the methods used for teaching literacy to students with IDs, huge performance-level gaps between students with IDs placed in the same classroom, lack of prerequisite skills for literacy learning among students, special education teachers' lack of knowledge and skills for teaching literacy, and lack of parental support for students with IDs at homes. Data were also collected on topics such as the use of reinforcement in literacy teaching, repetition, individualized teaching, group teaching, peer teaching, and assigning homework.