by Sylvie Kashdan
Since 1997, Robby Barnes and I have been working as a team to teach English to visually impaired and blind immigrants and refugees. I have often been asked how we do it. The short answer is by combining our personal knowledge of adapting to living with visual impairments with techniques that allow us to tailor our teaching methods to the individual needs and goals of our diverse students.
Robby is partially sighted, and I am totally blind. Each of us has developed a variety of adaptive skills over the years that have enabled us to complete college and graduate school, work in a number of different kinds of jobs, volunteer in community programs, enjoy many kinds of recreational activities, travel and develop friendships with people in other countries. Moreover, we are both avid readers and writers. Robby uses print, and I use braille. We both use computers -- Robby with a screen magnification program and I with a screen reader. And both of us have continually reflected on how we learned to do these things and the adaptive skills that make the doing possible. Teaching Diverse Students
As native New Yorkers, both Robby and I grew up with friends and acquaintances who spoke at least one other language before they learned English. And, as part of a family of immigrants, I was always close to people who spoke English as their second or third language. Since our early teaching careers began in New York City, we always had a high proportion of students who came from places where English was not the primary language. So, we learned early to consider the needs of new English learners, even when we were not focused directly on teaching English. In 1988, we both began new careers teaching English as a second language (ESL).
In 1997, we were both hired as independent professional ESL tutors for some clients of the Washington State Department of Services for the Blind. We were initially called in by Doug Hildie, an insightful and dedicated vocational rehabilitation counselor in Seattle. Hildie had worked for the Washington State Department of Services for the Blind for 20 years. By the late 1990s he was concerned about an increasing number of visually impaired and blind clients who were arriving in the United States from a variety of countries where English was not the primary language. Although many of his new clients spoke a little English, few could read, write, or speak English well enough to communicate effectively with others.
It became clear to Hildie that new English learners with visual limitations have needs which are greater than and in some respects different from both the needs of fluent English speakers who are visually impaired or blind and those of fully sighted new English learners. He was finding that simply adding together training, educational offerings and services designed for fluent English speaking visually impaired people and those designed for fully sighted new English learners could not meet the needs of his visually impaired clients for whom English was not a primary language.
Instruction in adaptive skills is heavily reliant on participants' familiarity with spoken English. Providing native language interpreters proved to be generally unsatisfactory, both because the interpreters were unfamiliar with what was being taught and so often confused the students as much as they helped them, and because the amount of interpreter services required was so expensive.
Hildie was not satisfied with the common practice of simply letting these clients stay home or channeling them into unskilled manual jobs and hoping that they would learn English on their own in time. He wanted to do something more that would help to improve their chances for personal fulfillment and success in the job market.
He tried sending these clients to local community colleges to learn English. However, it became more and more apparent that many visually impaired and blind students were not being served adequately by the English classes available for fully sighted immigrants and refugees. The instructional and other staff in the community college programs had little or no familiarity with the possibilities for, or abilities and needs of people with visual limitations. They were not prepared to help visually impaired and blind students in appropriate or effective ways. They were teaching students in large groups, and paying little attention to any specialized needs. The textbooks and methods they relied on were full of lessons centered around pictures, print materials, and other vision-based learning experiences. The individual tutors who were available to help struggling ESL students with their class work didn't have a clue about how to assist visually impaired and blind people beyond teaching them some basic oral communication skills. Although Hildie tried to provide additional support services for his clients, including sending a braille teacher to assist in the classes and work with the staff, nothing he did was enough to accommodate the needs of the low-vision and blind students, whose many challenges, which might have been annoyances if they had been fluent English speakers, were actually counter-productive for learning the new language. They were constantly confused by the references to visual cues of all sorts, disorientated by poorly produced materials in braille, and embarrassed by their inability to read and write the in-class drills alongside their sighted peers.
Finally, Hildie hit on the approach of hiring Robby and me to teach English as a second language to his blind and visually impaired clients. Specialized Approaches
Robby and I adapt our teaching styles and techniques to our individual students' needs. We work hard to find suitable materials, and we have found that students learn more easily when they are offered opportunities to learn through multiple sensory experiences. As visually impaired people ourselves, we have the advantage of being consciously aware of all the non-visual cues the world is full of. Moreover, we have always utilized a holistic communicative language approach, which recognizes that teaching a new language is not merely a matter of transmitting a long list of new words or phrases, but the more complex process of teaching how to use and understand a language in a new culture. This involves our demonstrating in clear, easily understandable ways the contexts in which words, phrases and sentences in the new language are used. We use environmental sounds, mimic sounds, songs that can be listened to and sung together, gestures, such as clapping, shaking hands, stamping feet, etc., objects that can be touched, moved around, worn, made with clay or paper, smelled, cooked, eaten, and so on. Since the meanings of words, phrases and sentences all depend on the settings and situations in which they occur, we utilize either real life settings or simulate, as best our classroom facilities allow, settings such as a home, store, park, and the like. And students need to practice interacting in English in various situations in those settings.
The most significant research over the last 30 years has shown that students learn new languages best when their teachers replace isolated skill exercises and drills with actual real-world social interactions involving interesting activities with both people and objects. It is also important for students to learn speaking and listening, and reading and writing at the same time and in an integrated way, both to reinforce the language learning process through a variety of channels, and to foster authentic functional literacy in the new language.
This holistic communicative perspective is particularly relevant and even crucial for enabling visually impaired and blind adult students to learn the new language, and especially for developing authentic functional literacy in accessible formats. Our students need to learn English literacy through braille, large print and speech-accessible computers in contexts that encourage them to practice using these accessible formats. It has become clear to us that new English learners who are visually impaired and blind derive tremendous benefit from studying English with people who are naturally using these formats themselves on a regular basis, because this provides them with both real positive role models and authentic reasons for practicing reading and writing in accessible formats. We want to help visually impaired immigrants and refugees to participate in the sighted world, including in mainstream educational institutions. But only when they have developed some functional literacy will they be able to utilize accessible formats to successfully learn other subjects along with sighted peers.
In 1998, Doug Hildie suggested that we form a small non-profit organization specifically devoted to helping blind and visually impaired immigrants and refugees who need to learn English. The name of our organization is Kaizen: Program for New English Learners with Visual Limitations. Kaizen means continuous improvement in Japanese. To find out more about Kaizen, and to make a much-appreciated contribution, contact us, Sylvie Kashdan or Robby Barnes at (206) 784-5619, or write us at 810-A Hiawatha Place South, Seattle, WA 98144, or [email protected].