Our communication is based on using games in french teaching practices for learning disabled or underachieving students in a special education section of a primary school. Our study explains how a special education teacher intended to support  a group of four 7-8 years old students (second grade) with difficulties in reading quickly 7 complex sounds. In the french langage, some sounds are made up of  several letters, sometimes some of them sound the same but the letters which composed them are different. The special education teacher designed and used a board game adapted from the dominoes which he named the « sounds domino’ ». The game contains 28 pieces or tiles as in real dominoes. Each piece refers to a picture and its name or a written complex sound (Nédélec-Trohel, expected). The aim of the game is to find a matching piece for each tile as quickly as possible.

Prior to the play, we will explain how the students constructed the tiles with their teacher and the premises that served to guide his action.

As a result, it appears that the building and playing of the game improved their learning with complex written syllables along with the recognition of the words used in the game..

This study comes from a regional french project research (« Apprentissage, Scolarisation / Formation en situation de Handicap », ASFSH), which aimed at the analysis of the schooling of diseabled students and the inclusive practices.

As a methodology, while building on the Theory of Joint Action in Didactic (Sensevy 2011) to come to a better understanding of the teacher’s intentions, we used an empirical approach and a clinical approach. The construction of each piece of the domino by the four students engaged them into the learning of the relationships between the phonemes of the spoken language and the graphemes of the written language. In a way, we are promoting the use of this game to facilitate learning and as a mean to achieve success for learning disabled students. If the idea is not new, the way to help the children to make some sense of a complex learning as reading complex syllabes could serve as in inspiration to go further with them.

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