Enrique Leganés

When Foreign Languages are not seen or heard
Foreign language education presents special challenges for teachers when students are visually or hearing impaired. On the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Web site (http://www.afb.org), the organization offers helpful information for teachers to better understand terms and environmental influences related to low vision. And while most teachers are familiar with federal legislation and individualized education plans (IEPs), AFB also offers information on assistive technology assessments, functional vision assessments, and learning media assessments.

http://www.afb.org

Modern Foreign Languages and Special Educational Needs
The World Wide Web contains plenty of information about modern foreign language learning and about special educational needs as separate issues. The implications of SEN for MFL attract relatively sparse attention, which is why the present website seeks to redress the deficit.
This website is divided in the following issues:
· Glossaries of inclusive education terms.
· Teaching and learning resources.
· Provision and practice.
· Professional development.
· Special schools.
· Cognition and learning difficulties:
o Moderate learning difficulties.
o Severe learning difficulties.
o Specific learning difficulties.
· Communication and interaction difficulties:
o Speech and language difficulties.
o Autistic spectrum disorders.
· Emotional, behavioural and social difficulties.
· Sensory and physical difficulties:
o Hearing impairment.
o Visual impairment.
o Physical disabilities.

http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/case/SEN.html#Top

Sandra Pérez Costa

http://www.elpforblind.eu/pd.php?lcode=EN&pd=1
The European Language Portfolio for the blind and visually impaired (ELPBVI). It’s funded by the European Commission. An interesting project proving it necessary for students with special needs, to have an adapted curriculum and approach to the learning of languages.
o to provide transparent and reliable information on language skills and competences of the learners
o to keep records of achievements in their language learning
o to maintain their motivation for language learning
o to plan their learning strategy
o to enhance their plurilingual and intercultural experience

http://www.braille.org/braille_books/
The International Braille Research Centre has developed a project for blind people to have a freer access to reading. They keep a collection of books in Braille that can be used by blind people. The main requirement is to have tools such as Braille Display device, or a Braille note-taker.
This link explains the importance of the project and offers a database of the titles both, by author and by title.

http://pbskids.org/arthur/parentsteachers/lesson/communication/index.html
This is a sample lesson plan for a unit designed for children with disabilities. Parents and teachers’ oriented. With downloadable materials (Adobe Acrobat is needed).
The main page is http://www.pbs.org

Carmen Macías Corredera

Blind students: AER ( Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired)

Description: The mission of this association is to provide education and rehabilitation services to people with visual impairments, offering professional development opportunities, publications, and public advocacy. It also offers to blind and visually impaired people different materials in order to improve their learning faculty.

http://aerbvi.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=3


Deaf students: Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

Description: It is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal integrating and coordinating basic and applied research relating to individuals who are deaf, including cultural, developmental, linguistic, and educational topics.

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/deafed/about.html

Marta Villodres

E-LEARNING for blind students

With this web site we can be informed about using E-learning as a method for blind people. It also provides some explanations about how it works and some critics on the advantages and disadvantages of its use.
Different technologies of learning acquisition are also mentioned in order to make people understand the processes.
If you also need further information about this topic, bibliography is detailed.

http://www.formatex.org/micte2005/143.pdf

Teaching English to Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students at secondary school. Methodologies

This web site provides teachers of English at secondary schools new visions of the teaching processes.
Some methodological ideas are given as examples for those professionals who are interested in this area or have students with this type of disability in their classrooms.
Some advices for teachers are also included.


http://www.pen.ntid.rit.edu/ewc/engcr/I-Fleming/Prague%20Seminar2.pdf

In this second website teachers can find new materials and bibliography for teaching English to deaf people.

http://www.espaciologopedico.com/tienda/lista.php?Id=010703&actual=1

Lucía Mérida Luque

BILINGUAL-BICULTURAL EDUCATION FOR DEAL STUDENTS
This site will show you interested points which have been carried out at the University of Alabama for teaching English to deaf students such as the reasons behind bilingual-bicultural education, the population of deaf students who could benefit from it, the methods in the bilingual component and in the bicultural component, and the arguments against bilingual and bicultural education.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/6190/bibi.html

BLIND CHILDREN'S RESOURCE CENTER
Blind Children’s Resource Center is a very interesting website where you can find many things not just for how to teach blind children, but for deaf children as well. It presents possible questions a teacher or mother/father must wonder and all explanations and strategies they should follow.
I propose you these two links. The first one is the one I was looking for, it focus on blind children’s cases. And the second one is the front page where you can find all aspects they are working on.
http://www.blindchildren.org/textonly/to_edu_dev/3_5_3.html
http://www.blindchildren.org/textonly/index.html

Juan Carlos Criado

FOREING LANGUAGE LEARNING AND INCLUSION

Hilary McColl’s background is impressive. Among other things, she has worked on two European projects aimed at guaranteeing special needs students’ rights to learn languages. Being deaf herself, she is particularly concerned with children with hearing impairments. But her website also gives support in foreign languages to autistic children, children with dyslexia, learners with difficulties in communication, students who are blind or partially sighted and those with Down's syndrome. The link you have above will lead you directly to the section of her site which deals with how to teach foreign languages to these learners.
You will find the details of some projects and plenty of articles, resources and links which will be of interest to those involved in teaching foreign languages to learners with particular needs.

http://hilarymccoll.co.uk/specialneeds.html

CUED SPEECH E-LEARNING

The resource I propose this time is an online course in Cued Speech. The course is visually appealing, includes videos and makes us get down to working quickly.
But, what is Cued Speech? Although we could think that it looks similar to a sign language for the deaf, we are talking about another system of communication which uses hand-shapes to represent English sounds. According to the owners of the website, this system, which was invented in 1965, works very well when used together with British Sign Language (BSL) and can help deaf children to achieve literacy levels equivalent to the hearing ones.
http://www.learntocue.co.uk/player_content.html

Javier Linares Torralvo

EMOTIONAL SUBTITLES: a system and potential applications for deaf and hearing impaired people
James Ohene-Djan, Jenny Wright and Kirsty Combie-Smith

This article deals with how subtitles can have an emotional approach to deaf and hearing impaired people. For this purpose, an emotional editor was developed, allowing users to change the type, colour and size of the fonts, matching this way the desire emotion (colours can be used to represent the speech of a character).
From my point of view, this is a simple but very interesting paper. Teachers for students with specials needs could use this emotional subtitle editor as a tool for their classes when movies projections are part of the curriculum.
http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-415/paper19.pdf


"FROM DOTS TO SHAPES": an auditory haptic game platform for teaching geometry to blind pupils
Patrick Roth, Lori Petrucci, Thierry Pun
This paper describes "From Dots to Shapes" (FDTS), an auditory platform composed by three classic games ("Simon", "Point Connecting" and "Concentration Game") for blind and visually impaired pupils. Each game was adapted to work on a concept of the Euclidean geometry (2D). The tool is based on sonic and haptic interaction, and therefore could be used by special educators as a help for teaching basic planar geometry.
http://en.scientificcommons.org/455484

Rafael Córdoba

ENTRE DOS MUNDOS: Revista de traducción sobre discapacidad visual. **Número 24. 2004
This issue of this journal presents four articles to set the educational context of blind and visually impaired people in Europe and state the basis for a deep reflexion.The first article analyses the role that British schools for students with special needs play.The second article analyses the practical case of the well-known TEACCH approach (Treatment and Education of Autistic and related Communication handicapped Children) and its potential usefulness to people with visual disabilities. In the third article, the headmaster of a school analyses the concept and practice of the educative and social inclusion and reflects on her own inclusion experiences with blind and deaf children.The last article states the guidelines to elaborate and access program for blind or visually impaired students to go in superior education.
http://www.once-net.com/appdocumentos/once/prod/SS-PUB-EDM-24.pdf

Alumnado con grave discapacidad auditiva en Educación Infantil y Primaria. Orientaciones para la respuesta educativa. Gobierno de Navarra. Departamento de Educación*The content of this project focuses mainly on the work related to the class curriculum, and it also states briefly the specific tasks related to logopedic attention.This document is divided into three parts. Firstly, it reports the implications of the hearing impaired, it provides interesting orientations about the evaluation of students with strong hearing disabilities and it also presents how to organize the educational response. In the second part we can see some model examples about the contents mentioned above. Thirdly, there are some useful appendixes to extract relevant information from the students, their families, and their educational settings in order to assist in our decisions. Last but not least, the bibliography shows us a wide variety of documents related to this disability and the communication and teaching to students with this special need.
http://www.pnte.cfnavarra.es/publicaciones/pdf/creenasordos.pdf

Isabel Canales

LEARNING OF CHILDREN WITH VISUAL AND AUDITORY IMPAIRMENTE
This article explains the difficulties of learning of a child with visual or auditory impairment. It explains not only the learning of a foreign language for this kind of people, but also their acquisition of the first language. Then, it shows the problems of a student with deafblindness in a normal classroom. Finally, it gives you some suggestions for encouraging second language learning
http://www.tsbvi.edu/Outreach/seehear/spring00/secondlanguage.htm

SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS WITH BLIND STUDENTS
In this article you can find some suggestions for teachers who have to teach a foreign language to blind or partially sighted people. It recommends you some elements that are useful in a classroom and others that should be avoided. Moreover, it also suggests two exercises that can be carried out in a classroom where there are sighted students and blind or partially sighted ones.
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/PublicWebsite/public_cclanguages.hcsp (to blind people)

María Ángeles Córdoba Alba

DEAF CHILDREN’S STRATEGIES FOR LEARNING ENGLISH
This was written by Ruth Swanwick for the purpose of discussing the difficulty of teaching English to a deaf child. This article discusses the problems which faced by both teachers and deaf students to teach/learn a language. It is assumed that the best way to learn a language is to practice and immerse yourself in it, but what do we do when the student is deaf?, how can he practice the language? The author will explain a number of strategies to teach English to a deaf person.
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/000000304.htm

NEW ENGLISH LEARNERS WITH VISION LIMITATIONS
The article was written by Sylvie Kashdan and Robby Barnes. They discuss the necessity of the blind students to learn English. The article is clearly divided into different parts, such as, who the students are and which the difficulties are that these learners have. It continues to talk about how we can help them, their priorities, and what the other people can do to help better in their programs.
http://www.nwlincs.org/kaizen/Notes.htm

Carmen Cañete Luque

ON IMPROVING STUDY CONDITIONS OF THE CZECH DEAF AD HARD-OF-HEARING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS
This is an article about the experience of a professor, Daniela Janakova, who started to teach English to Deaf students at University. She narrates when and how she began this process, attending and planning many International Conferences for Teaching English to Deaf students. She also describes the Summer school she founded for Deaf students. Other important aspect she highlights is the methodology that she and other researchers used to improve these students’ level of English. Finally, there are two links at the end of this article which show all the information about many conferences, articles and materials used by them.
http://jc.ff.cuni.cz/mmp/on%20improving.htm

Teaching English to Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students at Secondary and Tertiary Levels of Education. “Ensuring that deaf students remember English” – The challenges and strategies involved in aiding deaf students’ retention of their English Learning in their undergraduate and post graduate lives.
This is a paper written and presented by Joan Fleming. This researcher describes the difficulty to Teach English to deaf students illustrating it with his personal experience. Moreover, he suggests some useful strategies for teachers and he also shows some specific activities for deaf students.
http://www.pen.ntid.rit.edu/ewc/engcr/I-Fleming/Prague%20Seminar2.pdf

Charo García Ferrer

ADAPTIVE CONTENT DELIVERY TO ASSIT BLIND STUDENTS IN ACCESSING COURSE MATERIALS
in this article a software system (iCare-Assistant) is presented. This software helps blind students to easily, with a minimum cognitive navigational load, locate course materials on a dynamic network of information pages. It attempts to address these challenges for blind students in accessing course materials from a course server, my.asu.edu, over the Internet at ASU, providing unobtrusive, task-oriented, and individualized delivery of electronic course information.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~candan/accessibility.pdf

LEARNING, TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT
It is a guide to good practice for teachers in relation to deaf students in art, design and communication. It deals with several aspects such as good communication strategies, work with support staff, teaching issues, assessing risk, assessing, etc
http://www2.wlv.ac.uk/teachingdeafstudents/Art_Design.pdf

Alba Berral

RECURSOS DIDÁCTICOS PARA LA ENSEÑANZA DEL INGLÉS APLICABLES AL ALUMNADO CON DEFICIENCIA VISUAL
It is an article written by Isabel maría suarez Rodriguez. Here she talks about her own experience as teacher and the difficulties of teaching English to students with visual deficit. She explains the role of a teacher and the characteristics of didactic materials for these students.
http://www.gibralfaro.uma.es/educacion/pag_1513.htm

BRITISH SIGN LANGUAGE
This web site uses moving pictures to show the basic signs for British Sign Language. It is a very curious site that can help teachers to teach their students some basic English concepts in sign language.
http://www.britishsignlanguage.com/

María Carmen Algar Prieto

Support for Deaf Students in ESL/EFL Conversation Classes
This article has been written by Steve T. Fukuda, a professor of the University of Tokushima, Japan, and in these lines he tells us his experience when dealing with deaf students, and he states there are many student with this physiological problems, so teachers must be prepared to face this situation.
The main activities and ideas he proposes are related with visual elements such as images, flashcards, etc. and written activities that have an important role in their learning process. Obviously, the use of sign language would be the best one, because it is the tool they use for communication, but there are also many other options that could satisfy the necessities of these students. Moreover, this professor also highlights the figure of a “note-taker” who writes on the blackboard in a summarized way the main ideas the teacher is saying, so that deaf students connect them to make them coherent.
At the end of the article, Fukuda proposes a list of some strategies a teacher must take into account when instructing deaf student as a summary of the whole article.
http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Fukuda-DeafStudents.html
STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING STUDENTS WITH VISION IMPAIRMENTS
This article is about blind students, and as we have seen in the previous one, there also some proposals to manage a classroom with students with this disability.
The main proposals appearing in the article deal with the hearing capacity, because this is the best way these students can manage themselves. So the teacher can provide them with materials and activities that best suit them. Video-descriptions and recordings are the best options, but the role of the teacher is also very important. He/she has to offer students a complete and detailed description of every activity they will elaborate (pictures and images, etc.), as well as the use of Braille adapted materials.
http://www.as.wvu.edu/~scidis/text/vision_impair.html

Natalia Villa Jiménez

‘Teaching Strategies in Inclusive Classrooms with Deaf Students’ is an article written by Stephanie W. Cawthon and published in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education.
The article is a study carried out to ‘investigate teacher speech and educational philosophies in inclusive classrooms with deaf and hearing students.’ Stephanie W. Cawthon’s study focuses on the investigation on the model ‘inclusive’ application in education. The model mainly consists in the integration of students with any special need into the general and traditional education and classrooms. The investigation covers three main areas:
1. ‘teacher speech to deaf and hearing students’: different reception of certain oral input between deaf and hearing students;
2. ‘inclusive philosophies and teaching strategies’: a philosophy which deals with individual differences and an inclusive education. Some of the inclusive strategies comprise small class size, deaf culture and the inclusion of an interpreter in the classroom.
3. ‘the role of an interpreter in classroom communication’ as the translator of the teacher’s speech.

Link: http://jdsde.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/6/3/212

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE. Mobility and daily living skills in an English language classroom.

It is an article written by Boguslaw Marek where he proposes interesting activities for blind and visually impaired students. His purpose is to teach English by ‘bringing to life pictures, maps and diagrams’ and by using ‘mobility and daily living skills’ in order to give the visually impaired students confidence and independence.

Link: http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/case/sen.html#Special

María Simón Rodríguez

Teaching English to Blind and Visually Impaired Pupils
It is an article written by Anna Maria Aiazzi where she writes about her experience teaching at secondary school to blind and visually impaired students, highlighting the attitude and methodology the teacher must have in an English classroom with these special need students
www.hltmag.co.uk/jan08/stud02.rtf

Strategies to teach how to read English at loud to deaf young learners
In this children guide you can find an article commenting on very interesting and useful techniques about how deaf young children can learn reading at loud. There are other related articles about playing games to learn reading at early stages, which at the same time can be used with deaf children.
http://www.guiainfantil.com/libros/Lectura/sordos.htm

Laura Gacía Donoso

SIGN ON!: An interactive sign bilingual English course

The aim of SignOn! is to enable deaf sign language users to use written English for international communication via the Internet by producing an interactive sign bilingual English course. The target group of the ‘Sign On!’ project are deaf people who are fluent in their national sign language and may have some knowledge of International Sign.
First, students choose a sign language: British, Spanish, Norwish, Austrian, Finnish, Icelandic or Dutch. Then, they can play the introduction video. Later they select the theme they want to learn about (Deaf Art, Deaf Politics, Deaflympics, Travel, Web Search, Online Shopping, Instant Messaging, Weblog, Netiquette and Online Translations). Finally, they are provided with a text about the selected theme with which they can:
o Select to play a video that will translate the content into the chosen Sign Language.
o Select to play a video that will translate sentence by sentence its content into the chosen Sign language.
o Do vocabulary exercises with the words that appear in the text with visual help.
o Etc.

Link: http://www.acm5.com/signon2/index.html


Mobility International USA

MIUSA is an American organization that empowers people with disabilities around the world to achieve their human rights through international exchange and international development.
In its webpage there is a section addressed to teachers of foreign languages with students with learning, hearing and vision disabilities.
First, an explanation of each disability is offered. Then, some tips and methods are given to the teacher to be carried out in class depending on the disability.
Links to a considerable number of articles written by specialists about teaching disabled students are offered as well as multiple online resources that will make the foreign language lesson accessible to them.
Besides, some suggestions about learning a new language are given to disabled students, such as how to chose a foreign language course, learning resources that they can use, or possibilities for them to learn foreign languages overseas.

Link: http://www.miusa.org/ncde/tipsheets/foreignlang/

Teaching materiales for blind and deaf learners of English as a foreign language