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What practices and labels are themselves disabling? How can new technologies help stretch concepts of "normal"?
Words are the foundation of literacy. Words can express, in part, the joys, loves, triumphs, and sorrows of life. One person's thoughts, expressed through words, can powerfully influence and inspire audiences or readers and long outlive their author.
But not everyone is enamored of words. For some students, words are a kind of torture. For them language, and therefore school, presents a constant, insurmountable obstacle from the time they step into their first classroom, its walls festooned with letters, words, and numbers. If putting characters together to make words mystifies some young children, reading and writing with competence intensifies the tedious battle for these students in the middle school and high school years.
How can middle school and high school teachers help students who have difficulties learning to read and write well? This question has always demanded attention, and it seems that recently there are more ideas, studies, and tools to address this issue than ever before. First, teachers already recognize that there are differences in how individual students perceive and use language, but we can be more supportive of those differences, some of which may be an unrecognized advantage. Some students might have visual, auditory, or sensory insights that people good with words might overlook. Second, the way people get to know one another and have a chance to learn from one another is important because those factors help determine society's concept of "normal," a concept that needs to be stretched to include more people. Finally, advances in technology can provide practical support for all students, especially those who struggle in school.
People and Language Perception
Most likely, the readers of English Journal have a happy and productive relationship with words. They love reading them, speaking them, and teaching about them. One of the great masters of words, Emily Dickinson, surely meant to convey this relationship when she said, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry" (qtd. in Higginson).
Even for...