Paper details

Learning foreign languages is becoming more and more appealing these days due to a highly diversified base of educational aids available  on the market: textbooks accompanied by various components that work together  for more effective learning, teaching videos, CD-ROMs, audio CDs, graded readers, websites and other multimedia resources which are developed in a very interesting way in terms of factual information and design. However, a better situation in the area of language education does not involve everyone. As most educational materials are inaccessible to them, students with disabilities, including those with hearing impairment, encounter numerous obstacles to acquiring foreign languages. Adaptation of teaching materials for use in foreign language instruction for deaf and hard of hearing students has rarely been the subject of any broad research. The lack of generally applicable guidelines on preparation of language materials for students with hearing impairment has made their teachers design and prepare teaching aids on their own. The aim of the paper is to present basic adaptation tips for developing educational materials appropriate for teaching English to students with hearing impairment. The author suggests several ways to adapt language materials available in the form of audio and audiovisual recordings to special needs of deaf students. The solutions presented in the paper can become inspiration for a creative search for one’s own adaptive methods.