The reading skills of students with intellectual disability and complex communication needs

Abstract

Reading is a crucial competence to participate in education and in society. This is also the case for persons with intellectual disability (ID) and complex communication needs (CCN) since reading skills might enable an expansion of their communicational, educational, professional and social opportunities in life. Despite this importance, the estimations consider that most of the individuals with ID and CCN who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems for their daily communication enter adulthood without functional literacy skills (Mandak et al., 2018). Therefore, it is urgent to gain additional knowledge on the reading skills of students with ID and CCN in order to foster the understanding of how they actually learn to read.