THE IMPACT OF RECEPTION LITERATURE ON READING COMPETENCE IN CHILDREN WITH MILD MENTAL RETARDATION

The study investigated the impact of children's literature reception on literacy at children with mild mental retardation in the process designed on the adapted receptive model of children's literature didactics. An experiment of a one-group pretest-posttest design was conducted on the sample of seven children with mild mental retardation. In the period of one semester their literacy program was supported with children's literature education according to the adapted model of receptive children's literature didactics. After that, their reading competence was tested with the Assessment scheme of reading competence (Pečjak at. al., 2011), which was focused on two dimensions of the reading process: reading comprehension and the quantitative and qualitative data of students' reading performance. Among the last one a) reading speed was measured, b) reading rhythm was observed, c) reading mistakes were counted and classified, d) reading accurateness was observed and e) reading expression was measured. The results show the positive impact of the adapted model of receptive children's literature didactics on students' reading competence – the reading speed, the reading rhythm the accurateness of reading performance and the reading expression improved and the number of reading mistakes decreased.