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Working with Learning Disabled Writers

Learning Disabilities in the First Year Composition Classroom

by Lori Houston, Graduate student at University of Texas Pan-American

One of the most important things a first year composition teachers can do is to know who is in their classrooms. Today’s college students are not what they used to be. The college classroom is more likely to be multi-cultural, multi-gendered, multi-generational, and multi-abled than it was even as little as twenty years ago. The first year composition teacher cannot effectively teach the students without knowing who they are. Students with learning disabilities (LD) are becoming one of the more prevalent segment of students in the college setting. “Given that students with LD in the public schools increased by 37% in the 1990s and that the 1997 Amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990 (IDEA) have put greater emphasis on transition planning for students with disabilities, we can expect to see growing numbers of students with LD attending post-secondary education” (Shaw). Almost forty years ago, the Rehabilitation Act set forth mandates to accommodate learning disabled students in the college classroom. The types of mandates specified included things like the right to tape lectures, having a scribe and/or a reader, and extended time to complete tests. Unfortunately, these types of accommodations for learning disabled (LD) do not lend themselves to increasing success in a writing course. In the article Writing Issues in College Students With Learning Disabilities: A Synthesis of the Literature from 1990 to 2000, about 80% to 90% of LD adults have written language difficulties (29). It has become necessary to re-think the purpose and the effectiveness of accommodations for LD college students in the writing classroom and to develop new ways of addressing the issues that learning disabled students face.

Types of Difficulties Encountered by LD College Students

The most common area of trouble for LD students is the mechanical aspect. According to Carolyn O’Hearn, spelling, punctuation and capitalization issues are often used as criteria for detecting learning disabilities in students even if they do not realize it themselves. In her article, Recognizing the Learning Disabled College Writer, she does note however that care must be taken to pay attention to the types of spelling errors because “many college students are not particularly good spellers and their performance on in-class writing is often quite weak in this area” (297). It is the number and the nature of the spelling errors that tell the story. The errors she is talking about go beyond transposing the i and e in receive. Mixing up n and m, and more bizarre spellings of common words like yue instead of use are better indicators of problems. The LD students are also likely to omit punctuation altogether. O’Hearn also says that “it is not uncommon for a learning disabled college writer to average an error every two words” (300). An inexperienced composition teacher may not have even considered learning disabilities and instead assumed laziness or bad attitude when seeing these kinds of issues in their student’s papers.

Difficulties with content is another aspect that LD students face. According to Li and Hamel, “Textual coherence is a critical aspect of a written product” (37). Students with LD often cannot make clear references that the reader can understand due to improper cohesive pronoun use. Confusing language is not the only problem. A research project conducted by Steve Graham, Karen Harris, Charles MacArthur, and Shirley Schwartz, found that LD students seemed to think of essays as a question answering task and that they terminated the act of composing too soon without any concluding statements (92).

In addition to mechanical and content issues, some of the other travails LD students experience are test anxiety, poor study and planning skills, weak revision skills and perceptual difficulties. Naturally, all students are different, and the problems they face may differ from person to person. This list of issues is not all inclusive, nor is it intended to be understood as such. This is merely a sampling of issues discussed in the literature about the subject of learning disabilities in college writers.

Assistive Technology Available for Learning Disabled Students

TechTrend’s 2008 article, Assistive Technology: An Instructional Tool to Assist College Students with Written Language Disabilities defines assistive technology “as the application of science, engineering, and other disciplines that results in process, methods, or inventions that support persons with disabilities” (56). The most basic form of assistive technology (AT) for LD students is the word processor. In addition to avoiding many mechanical errors, “this particular technology has a motivational effect on students with writing disabilities; it allows them to produce neat and grammatically correct printed documents” (60). The drawback is that it does very little in helping the student with organization and coherence issues. There are other software programs that can help with organization. Inspiration Software put out an outlining program in 2006 that helps the user by creating brainstorming maps that can then be converted into an organized outline. It makes use of color, shape and spatial distribution as organizational tools to help students customize their approach to planning writing projects.

Speech recognition and speech synthesis programs are also an assistive tool for students. With speech recognition, the student composes his work orally, and the computer transcribes it to text. This capitalizes on the oral language strengths the student may possess. This program would take the place of a scribe that might otherwise have been provided under the mandates of the Rehabilitation Act. Likewise, the speech synthesis program would replace a reader. In discussing the findings of a research project evaluating the effects of word processing programs on the writing of LD, Martínez-Marrero and Estrada-Hernández, point out that the author “emphasized the role of AT in developing the self confidence of these students with writing difficulties” (60). Not everyone agrees on the effectiveness of assistive technology. Li and Hamel point out that the some of the studies they reviewed could be considered flawed because the students taking part may have already been comfortable with the word processing software due to the ‘practice effect’ (35). The study did not differentiate between students taking the course for the first time and the ones who have taken it several times.

Strategy Instruction for Improving the Writing of LD College Students

Teaching writing as a process is the approach commonly used when instructing students with learning disabilities. The process approach to writing theorizes that writing is the result of a very complex, highly individualized process. In order to overcome the cognitive difficulties, strategies should be developed for all stages of the process. “Strategy instruction can be embedded within the process approach to writing, thereby helping teacher meet the needs and interests of individual or groups of students as they work to master the craft of writing” (Graham et al. 95). The students organize their actions within the framework of the strategies. This is geared to becoming self-regulatory as the teacher eventually allows the student to use the strategies independently.

In brainstorming, the students are gaining access to the knowledge they already possess. “Listing possible words or ideas to use in advance of writing serves as an aid to memory retrieval and provided and initial survey of what is known” (98). Framing text is an activity that involves looking at the purpose of and the audience for the writing. Generating and organizing content can be accomplished by asking a series of questions, then answering them. For goal setting, students can decide what their paper would accomplish, then investigate what is needed to make that happen. In this way, the process becomes a problem-solving task. There is a clear goal in mind so the student can better keep on track as they work toward that goal. Revising strategies that use peer-response have showed some improvement in the quality of the LD students writing. In the study conducted by Graham et al, the students were paired with one another and the author read while the editor listened and followed along with paper. Then the editor would summarize the paper and point out its strengths. The editor would then spend a little time developing specific recommendations using a series of questions to guide the process The students who used this approach tended to make more revisions and produced higher quality work (101). Procedural facilitation keeps the students on task because the routines, cues and other forms of support allow the LD student access to the knowledge they already possess and this engenders a feeling of confidence. These forms of support foster the thinking process of the student rather than giving them easy answers. When the students are using their critical thinking skills, they are engaging with the work on a deeper level than they would otherwise. In the article Improving the Argumentative writing of Students with Learning Disabilities: Descriptive and Normative Considerations, the authors believe that improving the quality of the argument in the paper can be done through the use of scaffolding techniques (instructional interaction with a more experienced person, IE: instructor or tutor) that rely on meta cognitive prompts that are a general framework for arguments that include a premise, supporting reason, data and a conclusion (272).

Instructional Approaches

Instructors can facilitate the writing process of LD students in several different ways. During the pre-writing stage the teacher can engage in directed conversations or writing conferences with the student. These are designed to prompt the writer “with questions related to the audience, purpose, background knowledge, and ways to group and organize ideas” (Li & Hamel 38). The actual writing stage of the process can be facilitated with the ‘talk-write’ technique. In this, the students should be encouraged to write as they speak, therefore capitalizing on their superior oral skills. Dictating on tape for later transcription by themselves or others is also a useful approach because many LD students have superior oral capabilities and this approach uses that strength. (39). Revision is critical in the writing process, so having an explicit plan helps. “Revision plans usually range from content and coherence checks to mechanical and grammar examination, with the content and coherence check occurring first” (39). Group revision conferences are also very helpful. The writer then gets to see that what was clear to them, may not always be clear to the readers. The SCAN checklist prompts the student to ask themselves; Does it make Sense? Is it Connected? Can I Add more? And do I Note errors? Clarity and coherence should be improved (39).

Issues Between Composition and Learning Disabilities and Other Options

Some scholars are calling for a new look at the problems inherent in the current view of disability studies with respect to writing programs. Kimber Barber-Fendley and Chris Hamel take this issue on in their article, A New Visibility: An Argument for Alternative Assistance Writing Programs for Students with Learning Disabilities. “One major concern in the composition field is that first year composition teachers have not been sufficiently exposed, either in graduate training or in professional reading and conferences, to the critical issues in the LD controversy,except in what is usually a cursory, dismissive way” (515). Barber-Fendley and Hamel lay out a program that was developed to address what the saw as flaws in the current accommodation systems of disabilities. They seem to take umbrage at the unquestioned assumption that accommodations to create a ‘level playing field’ are the only way to support LD students (516). For Barber-Fendley and Hamel, it isn’t about making things fair or leveling the playing field, but rather concentrating on recognizing and responding to individuals inequalities. “Thus, assistive programs do not attempt to equally serve everyone but rather to provide for a few with particular needs. They operate with a liberal view of distributive justice” (527). The authors argue that addressing specific individual needs is more effective and more ‘fair’ than applying blanket accommodations upon the student. Each disabled student has their own needs. The type of assistive programs they advocate “are program initiated or department initiated, rather than student initiated” (529). These programs are based in the English department, but outside of the writing classroom. In this way, they allow the LD students to get the help their writing difficulties require without having to self-disclose. Kimber Barber-Fendley and Chris Hamel point out that “It will be to our advantage that we seek to treat our students with LD differently because it challenges our notions of how all students should be treated” (532) In an ideal writing classroom there will be no issues of fairness, and all the students will get the instruction they need based on their individual inequalities.

Works Cited

Barber-Fendley, Kimber, and Chris Hamel. “A New Visibility: An Argument for Alternative Assistance Writing Programs for

Ferretti, Ralph P., Scott Andrews-Weckerly, and William E. Lewis. “Improving the Argumentative Writing of Students with

Graham, Steve, Karen R. Harris, Charles A. MacArthur, and Shirley Schwartz. “Writing And Writing Instruction For Students

Li, Huijun, and Christine M. Hamel. “Writing Issues in College Students with Learning Disabilities: A Synthesis of the

Martinez-Marrero, Isandra, and Noel Estrada-Hernandez. “Assistive Technology: An Instructional Tool to Assist College

O’Hearn, Carolyn. “Recognizing the Learning Disabled College Writer.” College English 51.3 (1989): 294–304. JSTOR. Web.

Shaw, Stan. “College and the Student with Learning Disabilities.” Missouri State University. 26 Aug. 2010. Web. 03 Nov.