Varied Supports

d

With spell checking, students have to choose the correct spelling from a list of possible words. © 1983-1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Screenshot reprinted by permission from Microsoft Corporation.

If setting the level of challenge correctly is one half of finding a student's zone of proximal development, the other half is providing the appropriate supports, or scaffolds. While the best scaffold is another person who can relate directly to the learner, computers can provide some wonderful and varied supports that extend a learner's reach. These include spell checkers, word prediction, voice recognition, wizards, prompts, help menus, and multimedia tools. Many of these have been addressed above in connection with their support of pattern recognition and strategy learning. Yet all are also critical for teaching to the ZPD and supporting student engagement.

Spell checkers, for example, can enable students to produce more accurate documents and may at the same time help them develop spelling skills. Spell checkers compare the words in a word processed document with words in a dictionary embedded in the word processor. They identify words that do not match the dictionary as misspelled words and offer suggestions for the correct spelling. After selecting a new spelling from the list, writers can substitute it for the original word with a keystroke. Spell checkers can be set up to check during writing or to analyze a completed or partially completed text on request. For students with learning disabilities, spell checkers may provide support but may also bring some difficulties (MacArthur, Graham, Haynes, & DeLaPaz, 1996). They find both false negatives (proper names that are spelled correctly but are not in the dictionary, for example) and false positives (words that are in the dictionary but are incorrectly spelled for the context in which they are placed, as often happens with homonyms). Further, because students with learning disabilities often produce spellings very far from correct, spell checkers may not "figure out" what a student was trying to spell and therefore fail to generate the correct spelling. Spell checkers also tend to produce lists of esoteric words, difficult for students with learning disabilities to read or recognize. Since these students often have habitual misspelling patterns (i.e. spell by their own "rules") they may not be able to recognize the correct spelling from a list of alternatives.

d

d

Writer's Helper can support the process of writing, helping students stay engaged in challenging tasks. Adapted from Writer's Helper Version 4.0 for Macintosh. © 1989, 1996 by William Wresch. Published by Prentice Hall Inc. Used by permission.

Still, spell checkers have utility for students with learning disabilities. MacArthur et al. (1996) summarize an earlier study showing that students with learning disabilities corrected 36% of their spelling errors using a spell checker. Though this number appears discouragingly low, many of these students typically fail to correct any of their own errors. Spell checkers that read the alternatives aloud can be enormously helpful for students with learning disabilities. Examples include Co:Writer, SpellTools (for Macintosh), Planet.speller (for Windows), and Aurora for Windows. Particularly with text-to-speech, spell checkers support students in learning to self-evaluate their work and also to produce more accurate writing.

Voice recognition, mentioned in connection with strategy support, scaffolds text entry, and when combined with TTS feedback can provide a highly supported environment for getting thoughts and ideas into textual form. Appropriate use of an array of supports can enable students to produce compositions independently and simultaneously increase awareness of the structures and procedures of different kinds of writing. These tools can be customized or used selectively for targeted goals, thus helping teachers individualize and keep each student engaged. Writer's Helper works with different word processors and provides support for all of the stages of writing via menus that generate prompts and elicit responses. Completed "notebooks" can then be exported to a word processor where Writer's Helper can support revision and editing.

Multimedia itself can be used in a structured way to individualize supports and engage young writers. Students who have difficulty with text can generate a composition in images or sounds first, thereby building enthusiasm and tapping into their creativity. Teachers, peers, and technology-based text generating supports can then help them to compose in words (Leu, 1994, 1996; Meyer & Rose, 1998).