Addressing the students with disabilities
The students with disabilities should also be involved in the active learning process by using appropriate techniques and strategies. The following tips can be helpful to address the needs of the students with disabilities in English language teaching classroom:
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For the visually impaired students, the pictures, tables, charts, maps and diagrams should be well explained by the teacher or their friends.
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For the deaf students, the listening comprehension tasks can be used as reading comprehension tasks. Similarly, while teaching listening, the deaf students, can be asked to communicate with their friend after they have listened to the audio by using signs.
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The audio description should be clear for Blind students and the visual clues should be understandable to the deaf students.
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Teaching phonemic transcription of sounds is problematic to deaf students is problematic. Lips reading can be an alternate way to it.
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Groups and pairs formed for tasks and activities should be inclusive with the students with disabilities. Groups and pairs should be formed according to the nature of the task and the context.
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While forming pairs, the students with single or cross sensory impairment (either blind and blind or blind and deaf) should not be included in the same pairs.
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The students with disabilities should be engaged in the competitive tasks as well in one way or another. For example, the blind student can work as time keeper or the master of ceremonies (MC).
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Blind students should be encouraged to use the Talking Dictionary by downloading it form the Internet.
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The blind students should be provided with an opportunity to feel the para-orthographic texts (table, charts, etc.) in tactile (touching) made of by wooden or hard paper.
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The crossword puzzle is sometimes problematic for the students with learning disabilities as well as visually impaired students. Therefore while solving puzzles, they should be asked to work in pair with the students having no disabilities.
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The teacher’s speed of delivery should be made slow, and the simple sentence structures should be used while talking about the topics which are difficult.
