Special education in Saudi Arabia was formally established in 1962. The earliest cited literature on special education written in English was a 1970 government report. This article presents results from the first synthesis of internationally published Saudi special education literature over a 44-year period. This synthesis yielded information…

Writing is an important foundational skill, critical for success in school. Unfortunately, many students, including students with disabilities, have difficulties with written language production. These students lack knowledge of writing processes and employ deficient strategies for organization, planning, goal implementation, and self-regulation.…

The paper reviews studies on decoding's role in reading comprehension problems among learning disabled students and suggests that a subgroup exists of students with good verbal intelligence but who overrely on prior knowledge in processing written language. Distinctions between oral and written language factors are made. (CL)

As part of the activities at the Research Institute in Education of Learning Disabled Children, work was carried out with a group of about 30 children (grades 4 through 6) disabled in the comprehension of written language. Most of these children, when reading, went beyond using prior knowledge to provide schemata and interpretations; they…

The paper provides an overview of issues in postsecondary education programing for adults and adolescents with learning disabilities. Information provided is derived from a literature review and research and clinical experience. Definitional distinctions between learning disabled (LD) and underachieving students are noted and characteristics (both…

This article reviews the literature on spelling development in alphabetic scripts. It describes how once children begin to learn that the function of alphabetic writing is to represent the sounds of language, they go through the process of learning sound-spelling correspondence in increasingly fine detail, from syllables to phonemes. (Contains…

Notes that research and clinical studies have identified many relationships between various oral language processes and written language. Provides overview of findings regarding auditory receptive and expressive language processes, including phonemic discrimination, linguistic awareness, listening comprehension, word retrieval, syntax,…

The oral foundations of narrative knowledge are examined as a linkage to literacy acquisition problems. Examined are kinds of narrative knowledge acquired, the nature of story organization, and developmental acquisitions in story recall and generation. The performance patterns of language learning-disabled children on oral story recall and…

Theories of writing development put forth by C. Bereiter (1980), B. Kroll (1981), and K. Perera (1984) are reviewed and presented as frameworks for practitioners working with students having language learning disabilities (LLD). The theories are considered with regard to the assessment of written language, and written language intervention…

This article discusses similarities and differences between learning to read and spell words. While the processes are closely related and correlations between reading and spelling are high, the amount of information to be drawn from memory is greater for spellers who must produce multiple letters correctly sequenced than for readers. (Contains…

The purpose of this book is to encourage a more serious study of spelling by discussing it as both a skill and a problem and by highlighting some previously ill-understood processes involved in learning to spell. The 22 chapters are arranged under the following eight categories: spelling instruction and spelling reform, spelling and language,…

Four approaches to the investigation of connections between language by hand and language by eye are described and illustrated with studies from a decade-long research program. The four approaches support a model in which language by hand and language by eye are separate systems that interact in predictable ways. (Contains references.) (CR)

Teaching organizational strategies to language-disordered children can improve comprehension and formulation of written language. The semantic organizer approach involves activating and organizing prior knowledge, understanding text structure, and developing organizational strategies with both a verbal component and a graphic-structure component.…