Browsing by Author "Sirén, Erika"

Good reading comprehension skills are important for everyone. Easy-to-read books can give struggling readers an opportunity to acquire knowledge and improve their reading comprehension – in other words, learn. However, there are very few studies on the reading comprehension of people with an intellectual disability. The aim of this study is to identify the discursive means in descriptions of reading comprehension in theoretical literature on easy-to-read Finnish and ascertain how they either invite people with an intellectual disability to learn or exclude them. The methods of Foucauldian and critical discourse analyses are used in this study. The data comprise all handbooks on the theory of easy-to-read Finnish that have thus far been published, between 1986 and 2015, excluding those that focus primarily on verbal interaction. In handbooks on the theory of easy-to-read Finnish, the reading skills of people with an intellectual disability are represented within the institutional framework of medicine, special needs education and social services. Discourses in this literature are designated as the medical model, the social model and the cultural model. All of them enable both an inclusive and an exclusive approach to the reading of people with an intellectual disability. In the theoretical literature examined in this thesis, the most notable discourse is the exclusive medical model which emphasises the permanent problems that those with disabilities have with reading. The exclusive social model naturalises the acknowledgement of reading problems and obscures the institutionalised nature of the unequal treatment of people with an intellectual disability as readers. This discourse occurs mainly in the literature written during the 2000s. The dominant inclusive discourse is the cultural model. It assumes that reading belongs to everyone despite their cognitive capacity, while reading problems also apply to anyone. The inclusive aspect of the social model is mainly limited to highlighting accessibility, however not giving any emphasis to equal educational rights. It would be crucial for learning to acquire a key role in the theoretical literature on easy-to-read language, because without an opportunity to learn, there can be no social equality