Reading performance subsequent to aphasia: Strategies applied during authentic reading

Abstract

Background: As issues involving quality of life and overall functionality are discussed, more attention is being focused on literacy behaviours and use in aphasia. A viable approach to study reading in aphasia is the constructivist orientation, which has been at the centre of the disciplines focusing on literacy research and teaching for nearly forty-five years. Combining this orientation with qualitative research procedures provides numerous research opportunities in aphasia. Aims: The current qualitative study explores the reading strategies employed by persons with aphasia in naturalistic settings as they attempt to re-establish their reading proficiency during recovery. Methods & Procedures: Three persons with aphasia (two women, one man) with mild to moderate aphasia were studied across a number of contexts that required reading. Qualitative research procedures were employed to identify various reading strategies employed by these persons with aphasia. Outcomes & Results: Twenty-eight different salient reading strategies were identified across the three participants, with some of these also being typical of non-neurologically impaired individuals and some unique to the person with aphasia. These twenty-eight strategies served four specific functions (efficiency, contextualisation, comprehension, socialisation) and were employed during the process of reading recovery subsequent to aphasia. Conclusions: Despite their aphasia, these individuals exhibited a resiliency and an underlying proficiency that enabled them to create and/or employ various strategies while they re-established their reading proficiency. A number of implications regarding the need to recognise the complexity of reading as a process and the ways that this change might impact service delivery are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.