Suggestions for Improving the Language Development of Disabled Secondary Readers

As high school teachers of reading and English know, some students in their classrooms are poor in all areas of language. They read on a fourth-grade level; they write and spell so as to obscure most communication; they speak in simple sentences; their listening ability is so low that they can\u27t seem to follow most directions. What can we do to fill in the innumerable gaps in all these areas? It is the purpose of this article to present two ways to improve a student\u27s level of language development: 1) daily exposure to good literature in the original (not adapted to a fourth grade level) and 2) daily lessons in syntactical manipulation and sentence combining, including the use of language games