Background. Students with borderline intellectual functioning (BIF) can be defined as those whose cognitive abilities are below average but above intellectual disability. Having low intellectual functions makes students with BIF find many difficulties in following learning process, one of which is in comprehending reading materials. Reading comprehension is a crucial skill as almost all subjects at schools require students to understand what they read. Several interventions have been developed to improve reading comprehension skills, either by targeting skills which directly (such as metacognitive and inference making strategy) or indirectly influence reading (such as decoding skills and linguistic comprehension skills interventions). Studies show that the former has higher effect on improving reading comprehension. Summarization technique as one of the metacognitive strategies is suggested to be effective in improving students’ ability in understanding functional reading text. However the effectiveness of this strategy in helping students to understand expository text, which requires more complex skills, still need to be explored. More importantly, not much research has been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of this technique in students with BIF. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effectiveness of summarization technique on the reading comprehension skills of a student with BIF. More specifically, this study focuses on improving student’s comprehension of expository texts and targets on the inferential level of reading comprehension.

Methods. This study is a single case study which involves a 12-year-old male student whose IQ falls in BIF category and is struggling with reading. There are three stages conducted in this study: pre-test, intervention, and post-test. During the pre-test session, 3 expository texts are administered which then are followed by 6 to 9 questions. The participant’s comprehension is also assessed by asking the participant to retell the information given in the texts. The intervention stage employs a direct instruction technique and is conducted in 10 sessions within almost 2 weeks. During the intervention sessions, the participant is given texts and trained to summarize each paragraph while reading the passage. The participant is also provided with visual organizer and guide card to help him regulates himself during reading. At the end of each session, the participant is given questions to evaluate his comprehension level. The post-test is administered 1 day and 1 week after the intervention stage. The reading passages and questions used in the post-test are the same as the ones used in the pre-test. Oral retelling is also used to evaluate the participant’s comprehension level. The effectiveness of the intervention program is measured by comparing the scores in pre-test and post-test sessions. The participant’s performance in each intervention session is also analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Results. The first post-test shows that the participant produces overall 71% correct answers, compares with only 24% of correct answers in the pre-test. In addition, during the pre-test, the participant can only retell 1 to 2 key information of each passage, while during the post-test the participant is able to mention 6 to 7 important information of each text. The second post-test is not conducted yet. The second post-test will examine whether the skill is maintained by the participant.

Conclusions. This study shows that summarization technique is effective for improving student’s ability in understanding expository text. These findings are in line with the previous studies which suggest that the reading comprehension skills of students with low intellectual functioning can be improved.

Added-values. This study offers a strategy that can be employed by practitioners and teachers to improve reading comprehension skills in students with BIF. This study also discusses several factors that should be taken into account when conducting a summarization strategy intervention for students with BIF.

Keywords: summarization technique, reading comprehension, borderline intellectual functioning

Word Count: 602