Shapochka K.A.

Adapting Foreign Language Teaching for Children with Learning Disabilities.

In every society, whether it is a wealthy country with powerful economy or just a developing one there are people who need special attention. They are people with some kind of physical, psychiatric or social disabilities. Such people have always been grouped separately. As a result, there has been a wide variety of attitudes and perceptions toward them (Beire-Smith, Patton, Ittenbach, LeLoup, Ganschow, Javorsky, Sparks, Pohlman, Vygotsky).

The conception of integration of people with special needs is quite completely realized in the contemporary USA and European countries. According to it all people are common and equal members of the society, but with some problems and limited potential. From a Vygotskian view point, a child with special needs who is integrated into a regular class would be able, through co-operation and interaction with classmates, to develop their knowledge, language and thinking. Nowadays, the problem of people with special needs is getting more serious in Ukraine too. There are specialized classes which are more appropriate to meet such children’s needs and they are integrated within the framework of the regular school. It is teachers’ job to help less fortunate people to become full members of the society.

While it has long been recognized in the learning disabilities field that foreign language study would be a terrific challenge to learning disabled students, somehow this fact has been ignored in the field of foreign language instruction and in schools in general until very recently. As more research is being done and more teachers are recognizing the problem, more solutions are being created for the student facing the challenge of learning a foreign or second language and the teachers who teach them (Richard Sparks, Leonore Ganschow, Betty Myer and Barbara Freed). Children with learning disabilities are referred to as those who can be educated and trained. Thus, we have to realize that all students can learn other languages and they should learn foreign languages in order to be fully functional in the global society that is their future. In Ukraine due to different environmental, political, economical and social situation there is a great number of children with special needs. But the problem of teaching them in the whole and teaching them English language in particular, has not been solved in Ukraine yet. Due to the government’s policy all children including those with special needs and learning disabilities should study foreign language from the second form. Perhaps the most important influence on early foreign language study came from the national initiative, Goals 2000 (in Ukrainian policy, the law “About Education”). In this law foreign languages are designated as part of the curriculum, together with traditional subject areas such as math, science and social studies in schools and classes for children with learning disabilities. For the student unencumbered by a learning disability, foreign language study is indeed an enriching and rewarding experience. For the learning disabled student, however, it can be an unbelievably stressful and humiliating experience, the opposite of what is intended.

The purpose of this article is to show that foreign language programs for children with learning disabilities should be adopted according to the principles of instruction known to be effective for leaning disabled students. Their human right is to get appropriate education, but unfortunately, there is no special programs for them in Ukraine today, and the old ones are not adopted yet. Teachers of English in regular schools are not ready and not trained to work with children with special needs in mainstreamed or inclusive classes. Today they are put in situation when they need to find their own ways to teach children with learning disabilities in elementary school as there is no standard program for these children.

Children with additional educational needs or learning disabled students may have physical and conceptual difficulties, mild and moderate learning difficulties, severe learning difficulties and emotional and behavioral ones. This article will address the needs of children with mild and moderate learning difficulties which can include short attention spans and lack of concentration, memory problems- both short and long term, poor general skills, a lack of imaginative thinking. Their needs are diverse and when deciding what to teach and how to teach, foreign language programs should start with the needs of each individual child. As we can see some of the special needs are not so very different from those of regular class students, and many of the familiar principles which underlie good educational practice, as used by foreign language teachers of young learners, are appropriate (Gail Ellis). This include effective teaching strategies and techniques, selection of materials, task design, including differentiation, and classroom management skills.

Good teaching strategies and techniques include the planning and stating of carefully balanced, varied learning sequences with clear achievable objectives, so children know what is expected from them. They will also include using the mother tongue, as appropriate, to contextualise and support learning, providing clear, meaningful, concrete contexts in which to present language, providing plenty of repetition, recycling and reviewing, using mime, signs, expressions to convey and support meaning, involving children actively in the learning process as much as possible through rhymes and songs, stories, colouring, making things, dancing, drawing, games, stimulating children’s senses as much as possible through multisensory aids. Tasks should provide a reasonable degree of effort or challenge within the linguistic and cognitive abilities of each child, and have short-term goals and clearly identified steps leading to successful completion, as well as purposeful outcomes allowing immediate feedback and positive reinforcement. In order to design tasks, teachers need to be able to judge weather the level of demands made on each child is appropriate and also to identify the types of demand made. Teachers also need to be aware of the kinds of concepts which their students can cope with at specific stages of their development. Differentiation of tasks is also central to successful methodology and needs to be done in a way that the areas of experience, for example, a topic or theme, will be the same for each student, but the depth in which it will be covered will be different. For example, Leonore Ganschow and Richard Sparks in their research on foreign language acquisition in which language is described as having component parts or linguistic codes, (phonological, semantic and syntactic), Ganschow and Sparks’ Linguistic Coding Deficit Hypothesis (LCDH), states that difficulties with foreign language acquisition stem from deficiencies in one or more of these linguistic codes in the student’s native language system. (1) These deficiencies result in mild to extreme problems with specific oral and written aspects of language. Most learners experiencing difficulty with foreign language learning have problems with “phonological awareness”. That is, they have trouble with the basic sound units of language, phonemes, and do not recognize or otherwise manipulate these basic units of sound efficiently. As a result, the student may have difficulty with the actual perception and production of language necessary for basic comprehension, speaking and spelling, or with language comprehension, which may affect understanding and/or production of language on a broader scale.

Thus, the foreign language courses should be adapted according to principles of instruction known to be effective for learning disabled students. This means making such changes as reducing the syllabus to the essential elements, slowing the pace of instruction quite considerably, reducing the vocabulary demand, providing constant review and incorporating as much visual/tactile/kinesthetic (i.e. multisensory) stimulation and support as possible.

While it is good news that the underlying cause of problems with foreign language learning has been tentatively identified and that ways have been found to teach learning disabled students foreign languages, two major problems remain. The first is that it is relatively rare that a school can, more importantly, is willing to, devote an entire foreign language section or class to learning disabled students. The second is that finding teachers trained to teach foreign language to learning disabled students is even rarer.

Once again, as with all things associated with learning disabilities, the answers are often complex and long-term, and everyone student’s problem and solution is likely to be different. What is more important is that the problem of foreign language learning for the learning disabled be recognized for what it is and that the student be fairly and reasonably accommodated. Hopefully, as learning disabilities personnel, foreign language professionals and others become more aware of the research and literature, the path for the learning disabled student facing foreign language requirements will become smoother.

Sources for this article:

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5. Robin L. Schwarz, A Painful Collision, Learning disabilities and foreign language learning., 1997

6. Gail Ellis, Teaching children with additional educational needs., Bitish Council teaching English, 2003.