The foreign language learner with physical disabilities

This discussion will take place between Friday 13th and Friday 20th October 2006 on the Portuguese Primary English Teachers online discussion list, with expert contributions by Sandy Kinvig and David Wilson. We are all looking forward to a lively exchange of views, ideas and experiences! Sandy currently works three days a week at Wilson Stuart School and Sports College and two days at Priestley Smith School. She has also taught at Braidwood School for the hearing impaired. All three special schools are in Birmingham, UK. David Wilson teaches in the Equal Opportunities department of Harton Technology College, South Shields, UK.

n Briefing documents
Sandy and David have posted the following pre-reading materials online to stimulate and inform debate about the topic under discussion.

n Inclusion: teaching a modern foreign language to physically disabled pupils in a mainstream setting (2.6MB)
Sandy has submitted a PowerPoint presentation about her award-winning work teaching French in three special schools in Birmingham. It accompanied the talk she gave at Language World, the annual conference of the UK Association for Language Learning, in 2004 at the University of Oxford.

n Teaching a modern foreign language to pupils with a physical disability (32K)
Sandy has also contributed a Word document about her current work, teaching French at Wilson Stuart School and Sports College and at Priestley Smith School in Birmingham. She writes about her experience with pupils with hearing, visual and physical impairments.

n A foreign language learner with medical and physical disabilities (10K)
David has contributed one of his eleven teacher-training case studies of inclusion in modern foreign languages. This casework was originally developed to service a workshop on special educational needs and information and communication technology for initial teacher trainees in modern foreign languages in 1999 at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

n References of use in the teaching of modern foreign languages to learners with medical and physical disabilities (143K)
To provide colleagues with further reading sources, David has also submitted an offprint in Adobe Acrobat format from his Bibliography of modern foreign languages and special educational needs, containing online and printed references about the implications of medical and physical disabilities for foreign language learning.