View Content #27947

Stephanie Knight, Assistant Director

            Alarmingly little research exists related to the inclusive world language classroom. This reality is concerning, particularly in terms of both equity for learners and practitioner preparation.           

           Thankfully, the Virginia Department of Education published, “Supporting World Language Learning for Students with Disabilities" in 2017. This document provides a research overview of inclusive world language classroom practices, a series of strategies and activities to use in the classroom, and detailed considerations related to assessment. Of particular interest to practicing educators may be simple strategies, including (1) establishing clear classroom procedures to scaffold use of the target language; (2) using multimodal communication in the strategy to reinforce communication and deepen understanding of the target language; (3) allowing learner autonomy in the choice of the mode and format in which they respond to prompts; and (4) providing a wait time of around 9-15 seconds before calling on learners to answer in class. These strategies are salient because they not only provide scaffolding for learners with special needs, but they also have been shown to improve the comprehension of all learners. In this sense, though the importance of differentiation cannot be ignored, designing classroom activities with specialized needs in mind can be to the benefit of all learners in the classroom.

          This week's Activity of the Week was designed to help educators become more aware of the strategies within “Supporting World Language Learning for Students with Disabilities."