ABSTRACT
The current organized learning disability movement, replete with journals, conventions, and parent groups, began in the early 1960s. Three distinct approaches to teaching learning disabled children have emerged—the etiological, the diagnostic-remedial, and the task-analytic (Bateman, 1967). The contributions and limitations of each of the three approaches for teaching reading to learning disabled children are reviewed briefly in this chapter, and a fourth approach is proposed. The fourth approach suggests that many learning disabled children have certain characteristics that require very precise and careful teaching of decoding if they are to achieve mastery of beginning reading skills. This fourth approach combines task-analytic programming of reading instruction (e.g., Engelmann & Bruner, 1974; Venezky, 1975) with research on the learning processes of learning disabled children (Hallahan & Kauffman, 1976; Ross, 1976) and proposes that aptitude-treatment interaction is a viable premise on which to rest the combination (Salomon, 1972; Tobias, 1976).
