College Composition: Recognizing the Learning Disabled Writer

Writing disabled students often struggle in the college classroom, the nature of their dysfunction unrecognized by themselves or their teachers. Some, more fortunate, carry a diagnosis with them from high school and enter a college program sympathetic to their needs, but many more remain misunderstood. Generally, the strategy of college composition instructors who receive a student paper similar to the excerpt that follows is to redouble the usual remedial measures: The storie billy, is a tragie as a pic of the problems, of the rasening a retard Child. the mother does'en the problem that th boy has, When the remediative techniques for spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure have little or no effect, instructor and student share confusion and failure. The baffled student often drops and enrolls in freshman English repeatedly, hoping to overcome the problem under each new teacher . In consequence, each succeeding teacher mutters about the failure of secondary schools, low standards of community colleges, college admission standards, and, even more darkly, about mental retardation or emotional disturbance. This scenario of frustration becomes most complex in large urban universities where students from a variety of cultures, educational preparations, and age groups enter, leave, return, and leave again. The chief hope for the writing disabled student in the college classroom is that English composition instructors learn how to make tentative identification of writing dysfunction . Students thus singled out can be referred for testing and diagnosis that may result in appropriate educational intervention; or, if facilities for special testing and teaching are not available, they at least can be recognized-not as mentally retarded, emotionally impaired, or grossly illiterate but as students having a disability that prevents them from processing language adequately, a disability that does not yield to usual remediative techniques. Identifying the kinds of writing errors which result from learning disability proves difficult for college teachers. Very few have had educational preparation that includes a review of language disorders. In fact, although colleges regularly accommodate physically and sensorially handicapped