Shaft Encoders in VCS

Hello everybody,
My team has a flywheel design and we are using shaft encoders for position tracking purposes. I am coding in Vex Coding Studio in C++ Pro. I was wondering if anybody could help me out with the configuration of the shaft encoders. I wanted to know if there is a way to possibly combine the two ports required by an encoder into one sensor value, like in RobotC. Also, I was having a problem where the sensors would output an extremely large number and not change when the robot moves. Could this be a coding issue or maybe something with the wiring? Sorry I do not have access to my robot until tomorrow, so I cannot test this myself as of right now. I just wanted to see if I could find a solution before our next team meeting. Thanks all and any help is appreciated!