2. IN PAIRS. ELT approaches and adjustment (accommodation) strategies in teaching learners with hearing loss. 50 min.
1) Read the following questions and see if your background knowledge is sufficient for answering:
• What devices may help learners with hearing impairments understand audio information in the classroom?
• What teachers' accommodation strategies can help these learners at the lesson?
• What behavior may help these students to be more successful?
• What teachers' ot students' actions make it harder for them to learn?
2) Watch the video and do the quiz. Take a screenshot of your quiz results for the final report.
3) The following case describes a classroom situation which has got out of control. Your task is to read it and compile 2 lists of strategies:
- at least 5 useful ones practiced by the teacher and / or the student;
- at least 5 harmful ones that have caused the current situation.
A 16-year-old learner, called Nick, has a severe degree of hearing loss. His voice is quiet and his speaking is often slurred. He is a shy, clever and sensitive boy seeking for socialization. He rarely communicates with other learners, never asks the teacher to repeat information and sits passively when something is not clear or is challenging for him. In the same time, he comes to the lessons from a neighboring village by bus, which is expensive and time consuming. He does most of the home tasks but when he is absent, he never contacts anyone to ask about the current home assignment.
Nick is a student of a special school for deaf and hard of hearing students. He has been learning EFL for years without any visible success. That is why his mother decided to enroll him in a language course for children with diverse disabilities. There he is the only learner with hearing impairments.
The teacher started using a sound amplifier as soon as she realized that Nick could not understand a normal audio volume. She tried to speak louder and to articulate clearly but sometimes she forgets about it. The teacher speaks to students from different parts of the classroom and sometimes the boy cannot see her face. Nick was placed at the front desk to see all visual aids and to lip read. She invited a teacher aide who transliterated some English words into Ukrainian and wrote down the teacher's instructions and home assignments for him. Still when the aide was absent, the boy looked lost and distracted. Other children are usually noisy and they may speak all at once. The teacher has to call out Nick's name several times before he looks up. From time to time the teacher comes up to the boy and sees that he is idle. He may look sullen or at loss. but there are also brighter days. When the lesson is over the teacher always smiles and hugs him and it looks like he is unwilling to leave the classroom.Nick has an older sister and a younger brother. His mother is an unemployed speech therapist and she uses a sign language to talk with the boy.
As he keeps missing classes, the teacher thinks that he is going to quit the course.
5) Look through the teaching and assessment strategies described in the following article, additionally you may watch the videos provided below. Write at least 5 teacher's accommodation strategies that might improve the situation described in the case.
1) Top 10 Tips for Teachers of Students with Hearing Loss
