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Functional Academics

The document discusses functional academics and its importance for students with disabilities. Functional academics teaches skills needed for independence and adulthood, including core subjects, vocational skills, daily living, finances, and self-determination. It summarizes key components of reading instruction for students with disabilities, such as phonological awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The goal of functional reading is to gain skills adequate for daily tasks like reading signs, forms, instructions, books and magazines to support independence.

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Suellen Concessio Fernandes
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435 views24 pages

Functional Academics

The document discusses functional academics and its importance for students with disabilities. Functional academics teaches skills needed for independence and adulthood, including core subjects, vocational skills, daily living, finances, and self-determination. It summarizes key components of reading instruction for students with disabilities, such as phonological awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The goal of functional reading is to gain skills adequate for daily tasks like reading signs, forms, instructions, books and magazines to support independence.

Uploaded by

Suellen Concessio Fernandes
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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FUNCTIONAL

ACADEMICS
Suellen Concessio Fernandes
Education? Academics?
• Education is gathering all the knowledge
by various means like reading,
experiencing, studying, travelling,
listening etc.
• In academics, you are provided with a
structure following which one will gain
the theoretical knowledge and
sometimes practical.
• While Academic knowledge is already
decided by high institutions,
organizations , Education is something
that is decided by the seekers of
knowledge themselves.
Academics and Functional Academics
• While many students transition successfully into adult life, many are
at risk for experiencing difficulty during this period (Zarrett &
Eccles, 2006).
• Even greater difficulty has been reported for students with
disabilities (Brollier, Shepard & Markley, 1994; Wagner, Newman,
Cameto, Levine, & Garza, 2007).
• Therefore, students with disabilities, and particularly students
identified as having an intellectual disability, should be provided
functional academic instruction within the educational environment
with the premise of teaching skills necessary for successful
transitions into adulthood.
Functional Academics
• Functional skills, according to Cronin (1996), are the tasks that help
individuals become successful and independent adults.
• Bouck and Joshi (2012) defined functional academics as an
approach to teach “students the skills to help them be productive
members of society and support post school outcomes” (p. 140).
• Functional academics may include “core subject content, vocational
education, community access, daily living, personal finance,
independent living, transportation, social skills and relationships,
and selfdetermination” (Bouck & Joshi, 2012, p. 140).
Functional Academics
• Pre Requisite Concepts
•3Rs
• Reading
• Writing
• Arithmetic
• Science
• Social Science
Pre- requisite Skills
• These skills lay the foundation for academic subjects.
• Basic skills & general knowledge concepts are broken down into
steps that are more easily managed by the child with special needs.
• Pre-Requisite concepts include very basic skills needed to be able to
move into the other academic sub-components.
• Eg.
• Matching colours/ pictures /shapes
• Sequence colours/shape/ object to follow a given pattern
• Point to requested colour/ shape /object.
• Name basic colors, shapes etc. as requested
• Sort by attribute
• Make comparisons
3Rs - Reading
• Reading is the ability to decode written symbols and signs,
understand the meaning of words and coordinating these skills
together in order to read fluently.
• Reading is a complex, interactive process that continues to be a
primary means of acquiring and using information.
• Society regards reading as essential to daily living. Because reading
is fundamental to the mastery of other school subjects, students at
all levels must learn to understand what they read. They must know
and use various strategies—ways of unlocking the meaning of
words and larger blocks of text—to become successful readers.
Components of reading

Phonological
Fluency
Awareness

Decoding
Comprehension
(vocabulary)
Phonological Awareness
• The ability to listen inside a word – Fitzpatrick
• Phonological Awareness refers to an understanding of the sound
structure of language—that is, that language is made up of
words, syllables, rhymes, and sounds (phonemes).
• This knowledge occurs initially in oral language; students do not
have to know how to name letters or their corresponding
sounds in order to demonstrate phonological awareness.
Development of PA
Expected Phonological Awareness Skills

Given sufficient instruction, practice, and exposure to


many literacy activities, students should be able to
• Word level:
• recognize how many words are in a sentence
• Syllable level:
• segment and blend words of at least three syllables
• Rhyme level:
• understand the concept of rhyming
• recognize and generate rhyming words
• Sound level:
• isolate the beginning or ending sounds in words
• segment and blend sounds in a word
• change a sound in a word to make a new word in familiar
games and songs
Phonological Awareness

• Listening and discriminating between similar and different


sounds
• Rhyming
• Alliteration
• Sentence segmentation
• Word Syllabication
• Onset and rime
• Phonemic Awareness
Listening

It includes
• Attention
• Localizing, recognizing and discriminating different sounds.
• Reproduce a sequence of sounds (auditory memory)
• Listen actively, attentively and analytically
Rhyming

• Auditory discrimination
• Same and Different
• Recognise a rhyme,
• Predict another word that rhymes,
• Generates other words that
rhymes using contextual cues
Alliteration

Auditory discrimination
Same and Different
Sentence segmentation
& Word Syllabication

• Splitting sentences into


individual words
• Sentences are made of a
string of words.
• The teacher will need to
model one clap per word
to help students
distinguish clapping for
each word as opposed to
tapping for each syllable.

• Splitting words into


syllables
Onset and Rime

• It refers to word families.


Phonemic Awareness

• Words/syllable is
made up of sounds
/h/-/a/-/t/
(segmenting)
• Blending
• Omission
• Adding (synthesis)
• Manipulation

Pure Sound and SCHWA


Comprehension

Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what


is read.
To be able to accurately understand written material, children
need to be able to
(1) decode what they read;
(2) make connections between what they read and what they
already know; and
(3) think deeply about what they have read.
Comprehension
Types of Comprehension
Forms of
Personal
Questions Literal Reorganization Inference Prediction Evaluation
Response
Yes/No
Alternative

True or False

Who/What/
When/Wher
e/ How/Why

Multiple
Choice
Fluency

• Fluency is the ability to read a text


accurately, quickly, and with
expression. Fluency is important Appropriate
use of
Prosody
because it provides a bridge between
word recognition and
comprehension. When fluent readers
read silently, they recognize words Accuracy in

Fluency reading

automatically. They group words


quickly to help them gain meaning
from what they read. Automaticity
in word
recognition
Vocabulary
• Phonetics
• Sight Word
• Phonetic vs sight
Functional Reading
• Functional reading include skills are adequate to manage daily living
and employment (vocational) tasks.
• The main aim to gain independence and autonomy as much as
possible. It is therefore considered functional when the outcome
supports the student’s independence.
• It may include
• Reading public utility signs
• Notices and forms
• Labels and instructions
• Newspaper and magazines
• Books – illustrated and comics
Functional Reading - Objectives
• To read for protection (survival)
Eg signboards, labels directions etc

• To read for information/instruction


Eg newspaper, forms (personal information)

• To read for pleasure


Eg magazines comics, storybooks
Functional Reading Process
• Most institutions follow a sight word approach to teaching reading.
This is often supplemented with a basic phonetic approach to
decoding that is done as the reader progresses.
• With children who have auditory and visual perception problems
the use of a pure phonetic approach seems very cumbersome.
• There are new studies that show that children on the spectrum and
others with disability who are auditory learners should first tackle a
phonetic programme with red words or non phonetic words taught
by sight.
• Most schools (mainstream) are now more focused on a phonetic
approach with a fusing of sight word approach for decoding and
encoding (spelling)

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