Reading Difficulties of Three Differently Abled Children: An Ethnographic Study

Abstract

Moral reasoning refers to individuals' cognitive, emotional and behavioral understandings regarding everyday practices and relationships with others. Moral reasoning touches upon personal beliefs of human interaction the way these are cultivated through mores, principles and values in given societies. The objective of this empirical research was to question males' and females' moral orientations on justice and care. To this aim, participants were distributed dilemmas in a form of stories in which they were asked to offer their personal consideration. It was found that male participants have responded in relation to a justice-based orientation, while females to a care-based one. The interpretation of the findings showed that males tend to reply on moral dilemmas in association with the moral reasoning of justice, whereas females in association with care. This ethnographic study was undertaken as a layman’s attempt at a tentative determination and assessment of the reading difficulty of three pre-schoolers for the purpose of providing remediation and mediation. Such treatment of the problem, as designed by the researcher, would allow her incursion into her subject pupils’ private world to afford her a more intimate inquiry into their individual cases, for a fuller understanding of their problem and struggle. At the same time, through the mediation offered, she hoped to guide them in negotiating the distance between the two ends of their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), so that before the end of the study, she could let the bridge collapse because the three children have significantly overcome their initial reading difficulty and are already capable of performing tasks independently, or on their own. Regarding the results, two of the respondents had not yet mastered the English alphabet and had not yet fully understood the relationship between letter patterns and sound patterns. The subjects were more focused on television and playing rather than on reading. One of the subjects also showed evidence of verbal abuse from the mother. It was also suspected that the subjects had some degree of visual and/or hearing impairment. The results show that the subjects lacked the nurture component in order to perform well in school.