Accommodating the Syllabus to Visually Impaired Students in the English Language Classroom

Challenges and Concerns

Authors

  • Ana-Isabel Martínez-Hernández Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain)
  • Begoña Bellés-Fortuño Universitat Jaume I
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes.438891
Keywords: Special needs, Visually impaired, Higher Education, English language teaching, Curricular accommodation, TTS, Blind, Exam, Accessible

Abstract

The inclusion of students with disabilities in the education system results in content or assessment accommodations to suit the students’ special needs and to ensure they have acquired the objectives listed in the curriculum. In this paper, we aim at proposing different ways to accommodate a university English language test to a partially blind student who used text-to-speech tools (TTS) in order to provide them with accurate assessment. To carry out this research, the student has been monitored throughout the course to see which accommodations fit their1 needs best. All in all, we have observed that read-aloud accommodations lead to a better inclusion of the partially sighted student and better performance.

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Author Biographies

Ana-Isabel Martínez-Hernández, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain)

Ana-Isabel Martínez-Hernández is a PhD student and a part-time lecturer in the Department of Translation and Communication at Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain), where she lectures English in the degree of Translation and Interpreting. Her research interests are focused on Foreign Language Teaching, concretely English, to students with special needs in Higher Education. Recent publications include the book review  of Assistive Technology in Special Education: Resources to Support Literacy, Communication, and Learning Differences by L. Joan Green, Language Value 11, no. 1 (2019).

Begoña Bellés-Fortuño, Universitat Jaume I

Begoña Bellés Fortuño holds a PhD in English Philology by Universitat Jaume I in Castelló. She is a senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Universitat Jaume I, where she currently lectures English Studies degree students as well as in the degrees of Medicine and Tourism. She also teaches English courses for future Erasmus students and for graduate students within the frame of Erasmus +. She currently coordinates the International Programmes Exchange for the English Studies degree students and the International Internship Programme supporting students in the whole process. She is the Director of the Interuniversity Institute of Modern Applied Languages (IULMA) at Universitat Jaume I. She was a Morley Scholar in the ELI (English Language Institute) at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA) in 2007, where she worked together with the MICASE team. She has been a visiting researcher in Universities such as Midsweden University (Sweden), Katolische Univesität Eichstaett (Germany) or University of Edinburgh (UK). Her research interests are focused on Discourse Analysis, and more concretely, academic discourse both written and spoken, as well as on Contrastive and Corpus Linguistics, as her latest national and international publications show. In the educational side, she runs an educational project on CLIL in the university classroom.

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Published
29-06-2021
How to Cite
Martínez-Hernández, A.-I., & Bellés-Fortuño, B. (2021). Accommodating the Syllabus to Visually Impaired Students in the English Language Classroom: Challenges and Concerns . International Journal of English Studies, 21(1), 75–92. https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes.438891
Issue
Vol. 21 No. 1 (2021): Open Issue
Section
Articles
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