Abstract 4B

Sunday, July 9 1:45pm

Teaching Phonetics and Phonology to visually impaired and hard-of-hearing students in introductory Linguistics classes

Chak-Lam Colum Yip cyip@csuchico.ed
California State University, Chico, Chico, USA

Laura McGarrity lauramcg@uw.ed
University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Teaching phonetics and phonology to students with hearing or visual impairments provides unique challenges for both seasoned and novice teachers of Linguistics. In this talk, we address these challenges, identifying strategies and solutions for dealing with them in the introductory linguistics classroom. We first survey the available resources for teaching Phonetics and Phonology to students who are blind or hard-of-hearing (e.g., Braille IPA, Englebretson 2009; Tactile IPA, Lillehaugen et al. 2014) and discuss the practical constraints that may be involved in the adoption of those resources, especially for online classes. Following that, we introduce strategies and practices for working with hard-of-hearing and visually impaired students in both online and in-person introductory Linguistics classes. In addition, we discuss considerations that course instructors may need to take during the planning process and offer some suggestions on how course instructors can collaboratively work with students to construct alternative lectures and assessment tools that address their specific learning needs. Finally, we highlight how our experiences have informed our implementation of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework in our future courses and recommend ways instructors can incorporate course changes that will benefit all students, with or without the need for accommodation, in both online and in-person classes.