Learning

Teaching Modern Foreign Languages

Summary: Teachers suggest ideas for teaching languages

• Overview
• Planning and Liaison
• Flash Cards
• Your Voice and Use of Language
• Use of Tape
• Some Other Ideas

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Overview

This article looks at ways in which class teachers can make their teaching methods more accessible to all children, but particularly those with sight problems. Here are some of the helpful ideas suggested by a focus group of Modern Foreign Languages teachers working with pupils who are blind or partially sighted.

Planning and Liaison

When you are planning your classroom sessions, ensure that you liase with the blind or partially sighted child’s support assistant or support teacher to advise them of any resources you intend to use. The amount of work needed to adapt resources into large print or braille can be very time-consuming, particularly in language teaching, where many of the standard resources are very visual, with heavy reliance on cartoons, cursive script and busy pictures.

So try not to change your mind at the last minute! If you are only likely to use two pages of a four page worksheet, tell the support worker, they will appreciate not having to adapt those extra two pages! And give them ample time to produce resources in modified formats – it will be appreciated and will benefit you when your lessons are far more accessible for your pupil with sight problems!

Flash Cards

If you are using flash cards, blind and partially sighted children will need alternative ways to access the information you are holding up. Firstly, don’t waste your time producing tactile versions of picture flashcards – the focus group assure us that it takes up a disproportionately large amount of time for little or no return and they can be very confusing! Consider the alternatives listed here instead:

• Partially sighted children may be able to see the cards if they are at the front of the class. Alternatively, consider having an identical set of cards for a support assistant to duplicate what you are holding up.
• Ask a child’s sighted friend or their support assistant to whisper (in English) what is on the card.
• Consider using objects instead of flashcards, so that the blind or partially sighted child can feel the objects – this is obviously better for some topics than others, such as fruits but not weather! Get the school involved - ask pupils and teachers to donate objects for a department ‘props’ cupboard.

Your Voice and Use of Language

Don’t miss out words just because a blind or partially sighted child cannot see them, these children still need to understand commonly used language, such as colours, and need to know that ‘bleu’ is French for ‘blue’.

Use your voice! Introduce sound effects, act out words you want children to identify in the foreign language – angry, happy, horse, car and so on!

Don’t edit your speech. You can say ‘look at your book’ to a blind child, and they will read their braille version.

If you are teaching children with some useful vision, you can still use mime, but exaggerate your movements and again, make sure that the partially sighted child is at the front of the class.

If you are writing on a board, always read out what you are writing.

Use of Tape

Tape work is accessible to all children in your class, but bear in mind the following points:

• If a child is recording answers with a Perkins brailler, you will need to stop the tape so that the child has the opportunity to write the answer without clattering keys over the next bit of tape dialogue (a sighted child would write their answer silently as they hear it).
• Alternatively, the blind or partially sighted child could whisper their answer to the support assistant who would then write it down. This works particularly well for tick box questions. But again, you will have to make judicious use of the pause button to allow the child to whisper their answer without missing out on crucial dialogue.
• A sighted child and a blind or partially sighted child could work as a pair, using the same method as above, but taking it in turns to answer the question.

Some Other Ideas

If you are using a Powerpoint presentation with pre-prepared sheets, make a copy of those sheets in advance and give them to a partially sighted child for use in the lesson.

Again, use real objects! For example, if you are teaching about items of clothing, bring in a jumper, a skirt, a sock and a hat. Pass them around the class. This is much more interesting than relying on pictures and livens up your session for the whole class. It brings your role play work alive, too!

Many blind and partially sighted children have well-developed memory skills and team games can capitalise on this, using the sight of a sighted child, and the oral and listening skills of a blind or partially sighted child to report back.

It will take blind and partially sighted children longer to complete exercises, so if you are setting a list of 20 questions on verb endings, encourage the child to answer every other question, eg. only the even numbers, whilst ensuring when you set the questions that this covers all they need to learn.

And Finally, Two Fun Exercises

These two exercises have been used very successfully in mainstream classes that include blind and partially sighted children.

Walking Word Order

Bring nine children to the front of the class. Each child represents a word:

Katy = Die
Jo = Katze
Emma = ist
Lindsey = glücklich
Ben (partially sighted) = weil
John = sie
Beth (blind) = hat
Lucy = eine
Raj = Maus

First of all, ask the children to place themselves into the order of two separate sentences – The cat is happy. It has a mouse. So Ben will not be in the line. But the rest of the pupils will place themselves in the correct line.

Then ask them to place themselves in the order of: The cat is happy because it has a mouse. Ben will come into the line-up and Beth will go to the end! All children are involved, and it demonstrates word order in an active and inclusive way.

The game can be made more difficult as your lessons progress and can be used to teach other grammatical rules such as adjectives, comparisons and superlatives.

Taking the Grind Out of Grammar

Using the verb jouer, this is a fun way to teach about verb endings. Pick 13 children. 8 children are labelled either je, tu, il, elle, nous, vous, ils or elles and 5 children are labelled e, es, ons, ez, ent.

The teacher represents the stem ‘jou’. The teacher then calls ‘We are playing’ and the correct two pupils (nous and ons) have to come to the front and stand either side of him or her. It works equally well for all pupils, in French, German and Spanish, and can be used to teach other tenses too! You could involve the whole class – giving imperfect and perfect endings and calling out a range of sentences.

NB. Make sure that each child has the grammatical pattern in front of them, in an accessible format, so that they can check it out during the exercise.

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Last updated: 22/07/2008 10:47