ABSTRACT
Most of the children with Special Needs are in Ordinary Schools and most of them have reading problems. Critics of the behaviourist approach to language development argue that children using such comprehension passages actually use background knowledge or irrelevant cues in question and text, without having to read the passage or understand it. The proportion of first year children with reading difficulties rose from 19 per cent to 37 per cent, according to the Special Needs Department. One of the simplest ways of approaching Special Needs is to work with small groups of poor readers. There were a few reading games but they were used so regularly, all the sense of "game" had evaporated and they had been reduced to mechanical exercises. Accounts of children with reading difficulties, together with test scores and sample test sheets borrowed from local schools are often used as a way of giving students concrete examples of the complexities of reading difficulty.
