An experimental study to adapt reading text in specific subjects in the middle school

The purpose of this study was to determine if textbooks rewritten with a technique which uses the known vocabulary of students made the subject matter more comprehensible than the standard version of the text.

The subjects of this study were seventeen regular students and eighteen educationally handicapped students from three different Social Studies teacher's classes in a Knoxville City Middle School. Two sets of passages were chosen from each of the three texts and adapted with a general vocabulary list. Two of the six passages were also individually adapted for the educationally handicapped students. Cloze tests were developed for each version of the texts.

An analysis of variance was computed to determine if there was a significant difference in Cloze scores across the three versions. The Cloze scores for each educationally handicapped student and each regular student were calculated to see how many reached instructional reading level for the three versions of the passages. Adaptation has inconsequential effects for the normal students. None of the educationally handicapped students found the original passages to be at their instructional reading level. Twenty-four percent found the adapted passages and 44 percent found the individually adapted passages to be at their instructional reading level. The results suggest that the closer the adapted material was to the student's own vocabulary the better he did on the Cloze tests. This justifies this method of adaptation and supports the need for further research.