Worlds Apart:
Disability and Foreign Language Study
By Tammy Berberi
Assistant Professor of French
Director, Hasselmo Language Teaching Center
University of Minnesota, Morris
A Word from Simone de Beauvoir
~partout des contraintes,
nulle part la nécessité.
Everywhere limitations, nowhere necessity.
Memoires d’une jeune fille rangée
Who is in my classroom?
11.3 % of students in undergraduate classrooms today
report having a disability
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40% report a learning disability
16% a visual impairment or blindness
15% a “health-related” disability
7% an orthopedic disability.
17% characterize themselves as “other” with regard to these
categories.
Where have these students come from?
An environment tailored to K-12 education and
mandated by IDEA
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Accommodations determined by a team of specialists
who must complete and update an IEP (Individualized
Educational Plan)
Reasonable accommodation in college
Education is no longer “free and appropriate”
 The Americans with Disabilities Act offers provisions intended for the
workplace, but has only recently clarified language to explicitly
acknowledge higher education
 Reasonable accommodation depends entirely upon a student’s selfdisclosure
Students may not disclose because…
 they lack self-advocacy skills
 the stigma attached to impairment leads to all kinds of misinterpretations
and myths
 do not wish to burden professor with “extra work” or to draw attention to
themselves as a person who “can’t do it” or “makes excuses”
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Reasonable accommodation in college
Accommodations in FL courses vary widely…
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Basic accommodations in the classroom, use of adaptive
technology, flexible attendance policies, extended test
time, special sections with modified goals and pace,
waiver for GER
and don’t work…
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Data suggests that the prescribed process for getting
needed services often fails: among students reporting
disabilities, 26 percent received the accommodations they
needed; 22 percent did not.
Who is not in my classroom?
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Numbers of students with disabilities completing HS has
risen from 61 to 78 %, but only half of these receive
traditional diplomas (in NYC, only 23% of students
receive standard diplomas; the rest earn an “alternative
diploma”
Of the students with disabilities who began college in the
1995-6 school year, only 15% had earned a B.A. by 2001
(compared to 29% of non-disabled peers); nearly half of
those students had dropped out
Examining our (Learning, Physical)
Environment
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“I don’t have any students with disabilities in my
courses.”
“If you build it, they will come.”
U.S. Department of Justice crackdown on college
campuses to improve physical accessibility
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3% housing accessible
parking, doors, restrooms, signage, seating, web
accessibility
We’re “brainy” people!
The four skills:
listening, speaking, reading, and writing
vs.
Recent advances in neurosciences: PET scans
confirm that we draw on networks all over the brain
to apprehend a word or a sentence, and that as we
advance, all areas of the brain work less…
Building Networks

Recognition Networks “WHAT”
enable us to receive and analyze information—to recognize
patterns, concepts, and relationships.

Strategic Networks “HOW”
generate patterns and develop strategies for action and
problem solving
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Affective Networks “WHY”
fuel motivation and guide the ability to establish priorities,
focus attention, and choose action.
Basic Principle of Universal Design
What’s good for some is usually better for everybody.
Universal Design in Instruction
UDI calls for…
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Multiple means of representation, to give learners various
ways of acquiring information and knowledge,
Multiple means of expression, to provide learners alternatives
for demonstrating what they know
Multiple means of engagement, to tap into learners' interests,
offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation
Simple UDI strategies
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Foreground learning “styles” to teach all students how
to make best use of their strengths and compensate for
weaknesses
Assign a learning styles profile
Assign reflective essays at beginning and end of
semester
Create modular syllabi that allow students to choose
how to demonstrate mastery
Teach “bridging” techniques to activate areas of the
brain that are less effective
Simple UDI strategies (cont.)
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Color-code to help students perceive and understand patterns of
language
Make lectures and course materials available to all students for
adaptation and self-study
Create a note taking network and generate sets of notes for each
class period
If a particular student needs material recorded, make it a “teaching
moment”: enlist students to practice and create the recordings for
the student
Make technology-based ancillaries a centerpiece of the course,
rather than an ancillary
Familiarize yourself with Assistive Technology at UMM so when
you are called upon to help a student, you can
Technology
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Textbooks are linear, while technology enables
associative materials; that is, content delivery that engages
all areas on the brain, thereby compensating for deficits
in individual areas
Current state of affairs: we have to cobble together
associative materials from scratch, which can be
tremendously time consuming, and well nigh impossible
if one isn’t trained or isn’t inclined to develop meaningful
technology-based tools. BUT…
Introducing NIMAS
National Instructional Materials
Accessibility Standard
NIMAS, which took effect on August 18th, 2006,
guarantees that all course materials used in K-12 be
available in formats accessible to students with
disabilities. A state’s failure to comply with NIMAS
Standards results in loss of funding
Implications of NIMAS
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For now, NIMAS does not apply to higher
education and simply guarantees that the publishing
industry will provide XML versions of all texts used
in K-12. XML versions are much easier to feed to
braillers or to read by means of a computer
But FL publishing is already quite advanced and
vast amounts of material are already available in
“alternative” formats. Why are these still
alternative?
Putting the rubber to the road (when I feel
like I’m still using my learner’s permit!)
Take stock of what you already do well (because we
FL teachers are ahead of the curve)
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we encourage collaboration
we are fairly well-versed in the use of IT, though we
should strive to learn more about AT
we develop sequenced lessons that allow students of all
levels to participate
we teach and encourage kinesthetic study strategies and
develop all kinds of activities for our classroom
Putting the rubber to the road (cont).
In our teaching, what assumptions do we make
about how students apprehend material, the world?
An inability to perceive sound or visual cues is only
a deficit to us: people with disabilities experience
our class and the world through their impairment.
Examples:
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Tactile activity
Describing the seasons through sounds
Film clip with sound / image turned off
The Flip Side of UDI
UDI also calls for us all to recognize the role we
can play in mediating the stigma surrounding
disability and in acknowledging it as part of the
fabric of daily life and a dimension of simply being
human.
After all, why have we become teachers of foreign
languages and cultures?
Recognizing disability as an important
element of the target culture
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Challenge body normative materials by teaching
students “the words to say it”:
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1001: wheelchair, blind, deaf, disabled, autistic, diabetic,
HIV-positive
Joe Shapiro: “There is a disability angle to every
story”
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Incorporate materials that relate the history or daily lives
of disabled people
The James W. Moment
Examples for the French classroom
L’accès en France:
http://www.infomobi.com, http://www.ratp.fr
th
 The story of Laurent Clerc and Thomas Gallaudet in the 18 c. or
Louis Braille
 Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient
Lettre sur les sourds et muets
 Excerpts Notre Dame de Paris
 Gide, La Symphonie pastorale
 Collectif des Démocrates Handicapés
 Kristeva, Lettre au President sur les citoyens en situation d’handicap
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A final thought
"More than at any other time, when I hold a
book in my hand my limitations fall from
me, my spirit is free."
~Helen Keller
Basic Resources
Center for Assistive and Special Technologies
http://www.cast.org
David H. Rose, Anne Meyer, and Chuck Hitchcock (eds). The Universally
Designed Classroom: Accessible Curriculum and Digital Technologies
Thomas Hehir, New Directions in Special Education: Eliminating Ableism in
Policy and Practice
Kendra D. Johnson and Trudy N. Hines, 100 Things Every College Student with
a Disability Should Know
Andres Leibs, Field Guide for the Sight-Impaired Student: A Comprehensive
Resource for Students, Teachers, and Librarians