Language Play and the Learning Disabled

Abstract

Many students I work with are incompetent writers. Others, thanks to teachers who equate the ability to spell and punctuate with the ability to write, think they are incompetent. The school system classifies them learning disabled. In my nine years of teaching learning disabled students, I have often doubted I could help them learn to write or spell. But certain moments have had a resoundingly right feeling. Looking back, they center on a unifying theme-playing with language. Unfortunately, my New England conscience does not let me feel good when students have a good time in my classroom. It resists the notion that anything good can come from play. It warns that when people are handicapped they have to work harder than anyone else to get ahead, and above all, they have to suffer. I am recounting some of my students' language-play experiences because I think my conscience has only part of the truth. It's right about the work but wrong about the suffering. Many students I work with suffer inordinately in school, often without getting ahead at all. But I have found that when they play with language, they can begin to work productively like the rest of us. And I want to convince the rest of you who teach the sufferers to beware of your consciences. Talking about students playing with language or having a good time in my class does not automatically put me on the side of soft rather than hard educators. Language-play experiences teach a specific skill. The first is a game I stumbled on one day soon after I began teaching junior high learning disabled students in Greenwich, Connecticut. I used it for spelling. But it can be used for drill of any content where there is only one right answer. (Grammar, punctuation, character names, and descriptions.) Who's Right? seeks to overcome the problem of ineffective selective attention which many disabled students exhibit. I suppose it is a version of the old-fashioned spelling bee with scoring and rules of play modified for students more likely to get the wrong than the right answer. After every three tries at the word, the teacher says which answer is right and writes it on the board. Students, who may have a chance to answer the same question in another round of play, pay attention to the right answer. One year I had an end of the day class filled with extremely immature ninth graders. They asked to play the game whenever they had to prepare for a spelling test. My conscience said, They're trying to get away with something. And they were. But they were trying to get away with what I wanted them to do. It was one activity that kept the sluggish ones awake and the hyperactive ones in focus. And twenty minutes of this kind of study usually resulted in immediate review tests that were at least eighty percent correct, whereas normal individual study for the same amount of time gave students in this class sixty percent or less.