Classroom Access

Turning a desire to learn a foreign language into a reality takes dedication and discipline for any student.  It may take some additional effort on the part of the student, disability support staff, foreign language teacher, or a combination of all three, when the foreign language learner has a disability. This is because foreign language teaching methodologies and adaptive technologies or services aren’t always compatible. Nonetheless, solutions exist for those who take the time to consider and rethink study strategies, teaching approaches, or disability accommodations.

Challenges in High School

While twenty-one percent of students with disabilities are now taking foreign language courses at the high school level, they still lag behind the general student population (fifty percent), according to the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2. Increasing the number of students with disabilities taking a foreign language should be prioritized, while at the same time, seeking solutions to improve the classroom experiences for the disabled students already enrolled.

High school Spanish class was rocky for Alison Ecker, who is hard of hearing. “[The teacher] really didn’t understand how to best help me, even though I told him,” she says, recalling how listening tests would be provided on CDs, which made it difficult to understand without access to the speaker's facial cues. She needed the teacher to repeat the test for her, but he would put it off, eventually forgetting, she says. Her Individualized Education Plan (IEP) team was alerted to the issue, but Alison wasn't sure what else would work and she didn't want to create difficulties. Since Alison still managed to get good grades, the IEP team only prodded the teacher a few times about making the testing accommodations and that was it. “A lot of times ideas were put forth, but nothing was actually implemented,” says Ecker. “I think that when you don’t know how much better it can be, you just get used to the way it is; so it was probably just as much my fault for not thinking things could improve.”

When she took her first Italian language course at the University of Oregon, however, Ecker experienced an array of accommodations, including options for speech-to-text notetakers, FM assistive listening systems, and most importantly, teachers who made an effort to accommodate her in the classroom.

Ecker is not alone in her high school experience. Alison Ballard, who is visually impaired, took two Spanish classes in high school but they “didn’t really go well” either. “For one thing it was all grammar, no speaking, and the other thing, it was all in a classroom setting where information was either handed to us on a sheet of paper or written on the blackboard – neither of which is very accessible,” she says. Regarding accommodations, there was the disability department and the vision department at her high school, but “they would keep saying it was the other department’s decision, and I usually was stuck in the middle.”

When Ballard tried French at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, she encountered similar barriers in the classroom. However, the disability services office assisted her to be approved to go to Costa Rica for six Spanish language credits over the summer. In a conversational class with few students and a native Costa Rican teacher, Ballard’s language skills took leaps forward.

Sarah Franz, who became Deaf halfway through high school, remembers being turned away from an overseas program to Mexico. She had completed three years of high school Spanish and successfully raised funds to cover the cost of the group program. Then the tour organizers told her they couldn’t find her a host family because it would be “too difficult for the family to communicate” with her.

“They said that if I really wanted to go they would let me stay with the teacher in a hotel but not a family, and that this would be the only solution. I didn’t want to do that. They pressured me to drop out of it and told me I would get my money back,” Franz recalls. “I should have never allowed them to do that, but it was my lack of knowledge and theirs. I didn’t know what my rights really were then.” Later, at the University of Michigan, Franz participated in an intensive language program in Italy where she received some classroom accommodations. She finally had the host family experience she wanted during a summer program in Costa Rica while a student at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Not all disabled students have had challenging high school foreign language learning experiences. “I took beginning French in high school before my accident, and then, in my senior year, after my accident, I took French 2,” says Gavin Shelton, who has short-term memory issues from a head injury. “Because of my teacher's creative learning style and techniques, I didn't struggle as much as I would have if  the class had been in a lecture-only format. She is a good promoter of multi-modal learning.”

At the College of Charleston, Shelton found further support through a modified foreign language classroom that engaged students with learning differences. The balanced pace, discussion-format, full-instruction in French and low student-teacher ratio facilitated his continued success. “At first a lot of the French would just go by, but after a while I’d start to catch on to what she was saying. It really helped for listening comprehension,” says Shelton.

What Access Looks Like: The Teacher's Effort

Theories about how to teach languages and what works best vary considerably, and the approaches that a teacher uses may not work effectively for a student with a certain disability. Adapting those approaches to serve all students takes effort on the part of the teacher.

Students with Learning and Cognitive Disabilities

Shelton’s high school French teacher, Stacy Attafi, didn’t have any specialized training in teaching students with disabilities. “I knew he had a brain injury but I never really understood how a teacher was supposed to approach it,” she says. “His mom said, ‘You don’t realize it but whatever you’re doing works. And you just need to spread that around a little bit because that is what he needs.’ I think a lot of what I do is just plain good teaching. We have a lot of professional development about the visual learner, the auditory learner, the kinesthetic learner – each person has a preferred learning style and a good teacher will try to address as many styles as possible in each lesson.”

Some of the activities Attafi uses in her classroom at Wando High School in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, stem from the function and performance based language approach that is being incorporated into their standards. Ideas include:

Using a variety of approaches to teach a lesson creatively and breaking down the learning into small pieces.

• Put up funny clip art or connect the verb to a stuffed animal in the room

• Use individual whiteboards to write a story with new verbs

• Create a verb song or take phrases to make them rhyme

• Cut sentences or regional items into little pieces of paper and work in groups putting them together into stories or placing them on a map

Using a lot of expression and movement with activities that makes sense with the language.

• Set up a mini-marketplace in the classroom and have students order in French or be the shopkeepers to make it interactive and engaging

Allowing for alternative type assignments and assessments.

• Allow choice in choosing a written format like a book, powerpoint, poem, etc.

• Assess students according to how well they can express themselves in the language, rather than on how many vocabulary words they know

“By hearing it, doing it and having a song to pair that information with, you cross all these neuro-networks and it imprints itself in your memory more than if you were to just read it out of a textbook. It makes it a lot more three-dimensional,” says Shelton, who found this worked well for learning French with his type of brain injury.

These lessons have also been effective for students with dyslexia, auditory processing disorder, attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder and other learning differences in Attafi’s classroom.

Dayna DeFeo, an adjunct Spanish instructor at New Mexico State University in Carlsbad, believes that many of the strategies that benefit students with learning and cognitive disabilities also benefit all students.  

“Going over vocabulary with students as a pre-reading exercise is always important for comprehension – whether students have learning disabilities or not,” she says. She will highlight or bold the key words, teach students contextual strategies for gleaning the meaning of new words, and linking the word (especially verbs) to the activity itself. She also suggests all students put new vocabulary on sticky notes and hang them in related places. “For auditory processing [disorders], as a teacher I would use exaggerated facial expressions, strong inflection, and lots of gestures in speaking. This is good for all students learning the language – they need these cues too, and they can appreciate the cadence of the language and are less inclined to try to translate word-for-word,” she says.

For further tips on teaching students with learning disabilities, a plethora of online articles are available on the Foreign Language Learning and Students with Learning, Hearing and Vision Disabilities tipsheet, with particular attention to the tips suggested by Margaret Crombie from Scotland. A previous issue of the AWAY journal also includes tips from a French teacher based on her classroom methodologies for high school students with learning disabilities.

As for the workload concern of such all-inclusive approaches: “It does take another one hour or more to prepare lessons,” says Attafi. “Making a lesson where you have to cut up little pieces of paper for twelve groups, I’d just do that maybe once every unit – you can’t do that everyday.”

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students

Sometimes teachers may need to meet with students during office hours, for example, to provide supplementary instruction to a Deaf or hard of hearing student with oral components of a course, pronunciation, or homework that is presented in inaccessible formats (such as CDs).  Teachers can also incorporate cooperative learning projects and writing activities, or make referrals to the school's tutoring center. Nonetheless, many access issues can be addressed through simple classroom modifications.

“In my first year of Italian, for the audio part of tests, my teacher read [the material aloud] to us. As long as they were speaking, (and not using a CD) it wasn’t a big problem with my FM system. It really wasn’t as hard as I had imagined. I think I just had exceptionally good teachers!” says Ecker, a hard of hearing student at the University of Oregon who uses an assistive listening device. “The biggest problem I would say was being able to hear other students speaking. I didn’t realize that it was possible to have classrooms audio-looped, so I could hear everything being said in the room. Although I didn’t necessarily need to hear the other students’ bad pronunciation, for a while I thought everybody was doing better at it than me. But then I passed around the FM microphone when groups were doing presentations, and it made me feel better to know that there were some students at the same level, some better, and some worse.”

DeFeo, who teaches at New Mexico State University in Carlsbad, has successfully included a hard of hearing student in her Spanish language classroom. “We had preferential seating, and a listening system where I would wear the microphone and it went directly to a headset she had. Any time that a classmate answered a question in class or made a comment, I repeated it, which helped all students because I was able to model correct pronunciation as well,” she says. After learning about the concept of universal design, DeFeo rearranged the classroom in a circle, so that the hard of hearing student could see other students when they spoke.

Other modifications she suggests include:

• Transcribe the spoken material of short video clips for all the students to read; discuss key points and vocabulary before the video, so all students can experience the film and the images instead of struggling with the content.

• Assign audio activities that are available online so that hard of hearing students can access them on a home computer by adjusting for amplification; or allow for alternative online written activities, reading comprehension tasks, flashcards and other useful tools.

• Write or type as much as possible on the board or an overhead projector to help all students to work on spelling and grammar. Provide a print or electronic copy of classroom notes to hard of hearing students so that they are not burdened with trying to copy information while sacrificing visual attention.

• Use guided notes for the whole class – this way the hard of hearing student can follow along without having to worry about hearing every word or struggling to spell things correctly.

• Use lots of facial expressions, hand gestures and other visual cues, and speak slowly to help new learners follow a story or set of directions and to assist  speech-to-text captioners or sign language interpreters to keep up.

• Offer students with significant hearing loss the option to complete oral/aural assignments and tests in writing and through reading. Expressive ability and comprehension can be measured and assessed accurately through written expression and reading. 

• Ask disability resource staff to train faculty with information on hearing loss and appropriate modifications.  Invite the student to present information, or obtain an audio CD from a deaf organization, that simulates different types and levels of hearing loss, to increase faculty sensitivity and improve the way faculty communicates orally. 

• If the student uses sign language, ask deaf organizations or disability resource staff to provide information about how to communicate effectively using a sign language intrepreter.

Blind and Low Vision Students

Norma King, who teaches intensive English language courses to international students at the University of Denver, invited a blind staff member from a nearby school to do a presentation to students and faculty on interacting with people who were blind. This created more awareness among the students of their international blind peers. On the other hand, some students with disabilities, especially those from overseas, may not want to draw extra attention to their disability, or may prefer to share about blindness on their own with their classmates.

In King’s case, the session was useful for the faculty as they prepared lectures and class activities. “We trained ourselves to make sure when we’re talking to say, ‘I’m writing on the board and this is what I’m writing,’” says King, who, for some international blind students not used to mainstreamed classrooms, also provided verbal information on classroom procedures, such as the need to raise one’s hand and be acknowledged by the teacher before speaking out. “It was a lot of individual things like that – mainly an awareness that there’s someone in class who can’t read your facial expressions, so you need to describe what you were doing. I think the teachers were learning all the time, but some adapted quicker than others and some were willing to give time beyond class more than others.” 

Julie Sanfaçon, who has a visual impairment, took Russian courses overseas and found most of the teachers accommodating. “The first and second semester I wasn’t dealing with that much written information, it was mostly conversational. The teachers did not object at all to writing bigger on the blackboard and I did have a miniature telescope where I could look at the blackboard,” she says. “As time went by and the level got higher I was dealing with a lot more written information. I had to deal with the Cyrillic alphabet. The letters seemed to be flipping around – one symptom of my visual impairment. A lot of the exercises we had to do [included] reading the text in front of the classroom or to other students. I asked to not be required to read aloud, because it could take me minutes to read 11 words.” The inability to enlarge the text in class, the shape of the font and the lack of color contrast on the paper all contributed to making learning difficult while in Moscow.

Sanfaçon also experienced the other end of the spectrum when she became an English teacher for blind students in Mali. “Sometimes the students didn’t have any books, and that’s why it was mostly the teacher copying the whole text on the blackboard and the students learning it by heart. It was really low technology, which made things challenging for the blind students because the blackboard was where everything was happening,” she says. “The students didn’t have any magnifying glasses or other devices to look on the blackboard like I might have. Peer support was really the only way to access what was on the board. A fully sighted student was reading what was on the blackboard to the blind student who was punching away on his [Braille] slate.”

Claire Thomas Özel previously taught English to blind students in Turkey, and has published numerous tips on her website for teachers to consider, such as:

• Let the student guide you. Don’t worry!

• Encourage other students to describe visual material, pictures, or drawings on the board or in the book.

• Reduce background noise that is distracting and tiring during class work, such as traffic noise through open windows, chatting in the corridor (through an open door), the hum of the stereo (power ON, but not playing) and students whispering and giggling in their corners. 

• Pair the blind student with a friend who can read texts; but perhaps not always the same person, as no one must lose out on this opportunity. 

• Spell out important words for Braille notetaking. 

• Assist the student to find someone to record some sentences from exercises or texts for listening to at home.  

• Give blind students physical examples (shapes, objects) to feel and identify. This can work well for the rest of the class; e.g. for “It could / may / might be...” with objects in a cloth bag or box. 

For further tips on teaching students with vision disabilities, and accommodations and technology that are additionally available to those teaching in the United States, read the comprehensive online Foreign Language Learning and Students with Learning, Hearing and Vision Disabilities tipsheet created in collaboration with foreign language teachers and blind foreign language students.

In the next article of this issue of the AWAY, we will explore how students with disabilities and disability service providers can partner with teachers to make foreign language learning a success.