Teaching Writing to Students with Special Needs

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Chapter 15 lays out many of the distinct difficulties that special needs students can have with writing. First, students with LD know less about the recursive nature of the writing process, less about the features of good writing, different genres, the role of audience and the purpose of writing. They may fail to plan and organize their writing and they make more spelling, capitalization and punctuation errors. Students with LD also struggle with revising more than students without special needs.

So, how do we focus instruction for special needs students in the mainstream classroom? The first step is proper assessment. Curriculum Based Assessment, short probes administered to the entire class weekly or biweekly, will help the teacher to identify students who are at risk or who are not progressing at the same rate and level as the class average, monitor each student’s progress, identify a student’s specific strengths and weaknesses and plan instructional changes accordingly.

Dynamic Assessment will measure how students respond to instruction. In this kind of assessment, the student is given an opportunity to rehearse what he or she plans to write and is prompted to make notes before writing; after composing a draft, the student is asked to identify problems and suggest changes. Measuring growth only in terms of what the child can do independently does not provide a full picture. Measuring what a child can do with mediation provides  an estimate of the child’s developing abilities and gives a better look at the child’s potential.

The elements of successful writing programs for special needs students don’t necessarily differ from those that succeed in improving the writing of any other student. The difference is that special needs students often require more practice to gain mastery. Successful elements include:

Direct Instruction. In comparison to peers without disabilities, students with special needs require more intense and more explicit instruction. Perhaps mini-lessons presented to selected groups within the classroom, while other groups work on other aspects of writing, would be a way to offer additional review to students with special needs.

Self-regulated strategy instruction. Self-regulation techniques are successful for all students, but students with disabilities often need more scaffolding. The PLAN and WRITE mnemonics help students remember strategy steps.

Pay attention to the prompt

List main ideas

Add supporting ideas

Number your ideas

Work from your plan to develop your thesis statement

Remember your goals

Include transition words for each paragraph

Try to use different kinds of sentences

Exciting, interesting, million-dollar words.

The author contends that these mnemonics garnered positive results for students with LD and for students at all levels.

Other techniques for improving writing in special needs students are connecting reading and writing instructions, leveraging technology and utilizing speech recognition software. For many special needs students, word processing can improve writing by removing the need to write by hand and copy revisions. Spell check can also improve spelling. But some additional challenges, such as the need to learn how to type effectively, can become additional burdens.

Speech recognition software can be a great help to special needs students as can dictation. This chapter provides the details of a study of high school students in which students with and without LD wrote a series of essays using handwriting, dictation to a person and dictation to a computer using speech recognition software. Although students without LD scored similarly using all three methods, students with LD scored higher using both forms of dictation. The highest scores were seen when dictating to another person. This method can be used to help measure content knowledge in certain special needs students.

245 thoughts on “Teaching Writing to Students with Special Needs”

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