Teaching English language skills to visually impaired master students online

Despite the development of assistive technologies, visually impaired students (VIS) continue to face issues when learning English. Most of the research explores the role of technology and materials adaptation in teaching English to VIS; however, there is a lack of research focusing on development of methods and approaches specifically designed for online education of blind students. Our research aims to address this gap by describing the methods, approaches and adaption of materials used to teach online English as a second language to visually impaired master’s students in an inclusive setting at ITMO University. We found strong evidence supporting the effectiveness of collaborative activities in inclusive education and adapted this idea for our online course, in which we successfully addressed several challenges identified in the literature, notably problems with fostering blind students’ autonomy. The article provides examples of online collaborative activities, the analysis of the most common VIS mistakes and tips for online teaching VIS vocabulary, grammar and four language skills.

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