Error Patterns and Instructional Alternatives

Research is beginning to investigate the written composition of college learning disabled writers with greater care given to the task required and the measurement tool. Results are indicating that learning disabled college students who have underly-ing processing deficits may require different instructional objectives from those needed by college basic writers who have limited instruction or difficulty with the composing process. The balance of this article concentrates on two topics important to educators working with college writers. First, a discussion of error patterns of college learning disabled, normal, and basic writers across different tasks is pre-sented. Second, a few instructional approaches successful in improving the written language skills of college learning disabled writers, such as sentence combining and guided compositions, are discussed. I n recent years a growing concern for learning disabled college students has presented higher education with a host of new situations requiring comprehensive strategies. Investigators ' clinical observa-tions of learning disabled adults conclude that written language is often one of the most deficient of the skill areas (Critchle