Functional reading teaching in special education: Experiences of teacher candidates.

The aim of this research is to determine the functional reading teaching experiences of special education teacher candidates studying in the final year of the faculty of education special education teaching program. Teacher candidates' functional reading teaching experiences, the difficulties they experienced in functional reading teaching, and their support needs were determined in special education schools where they did their internships. The research was designed with a case study, which is one of the qualitative research designs. The study group of the research is twelve special education teacher candidates determined by criterion sampling method. The data, in this research, were collected through semi‐structured interviews, observation, and researcher's diary. The data were analysed with inductive content analysis. The findings have shown that the majority of special education teacher candidates, as prospective teachers, have difficulty in planning functional reading instruction, have difficulties in providing sound‐based teaching and developing games, in the teaching process due to children's severe disabilities and their inability to cope with problem behaviours. In addition, all of the participants stated that they needed practical functional reading teaching training and that teacher qualifications should be improved through intensive supervision for this. When the findings obtained from classroom observations in this research were examined, it was observed that, in parallel with the interview findings, teacher candidates had difficulties in choosing and applying methods, and they often used errorless teaching methods and direct teaching method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]