Вариант 12

You are going to read a newspaper article on education. Read the text and answer the questions that follow. Decide whether each statement is True or False and provide your arguments drawn from the text to justify your choice. The proof should be given in your own words.

Chen Guangcheng, the 40-year-old Chinese civil rights campaigner, is no ordinary student of English. What makes him an unusual learner is his blindness and the challenges visual impairment present in the English language classroom. Chen and his wife have been attending English lessons at the law school five times a week. They are both first-time learners and among the audio resources he and his teachers have been using are the speeches of Dr Martin Luther.

Philip Herter, who has been working for over 20 years in English language teaching, is one of Chen’s teachers at the university. This is not the first time he has taught visually impaired students, but he says, like most teachers, his experience remains limited.

The first step, he says, is to gain a thorough understanding of the student’s blindness before teaching starts. “The degree of a particular student’s impairment is a basic starting point. If there is any way to incorporate texts or other visual materials, then they need to be considered, and if possible prepared in advance,” Herter said.

“It is equally important to talk to the student and try to find out as much as possible about his or her learning style. Does the student prefer to work with Braille, or does he prefer audio? Is the student accustomed to working with sighted classmates or would group interaction in a classroom setting be a new experience?”

Herter says that the range of materials designed specifically for visually impaired English learners is limited. Hence the choice of readings of the Declaration of Independence and other speeches. “A lot of my co-teachers’ and my work has been to generate our own materials, appropriate to this particular learning context and taking into account our students’ backgrounds and their interests. As we go forward we build on what we’ve used before. The process is very much student-centred and, so far, I think it’s been working.”

But what about visually impaired learners who opt to study alongside sighted students? Jenny Lewin-Jones has taught four visually impaired students over recent years in her modern German language course at Worcester university in the UK. She has found that the students were keen to participate in the lessons alongside up to 15 sighted learners, but also that the changes she made to her teaching and classroom management benefitted the whole class.

“I found I was doing a lot more repetition. For example, playing a video clip more times or perhaps asking more questions to check comprehension,” Lewin-Jones said.

A strong message she got from her visually impaired students was that they wanted her to “carry on as normal”. “What’s important is that adaptations are done in a way that students don’t feel singled out. So when I showed a video clip, rather than asking visual questions, such as: ‘What does the woman walking her dog say?’, I would ask: ‘What does the woman with the angry voice say?’. But to the rest of the students it wouldn’t be obvious that I had made that adaptation.”

Both Lewin-Jones and Herter agree that the choice of practical and accessible computer tools and software, such as text-to-speech programs, is transforming language teaching for visually impaired learners, but the basis for successful teaching remains the same: listen to your student.

1-5. Choose whether the statements are True (T) or False (F) and, to justify your choice, provide your proof from the text in your own words.

Example : (0) The statement is true because the narrator has never read a single book in the original and has not demonstrated any interest in the subject.