Here’s a doozy of a question I encounter often in my work: is it possible that any learning barriers for disabled language learners are actually erected unwittingly by language teaching strategies that we consider “best practices”? Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes.
One example is how the visual turn has manifested in language teaching pedagogy. Many language instructors have been encouraged in our training to make frequent use of visual content to scaffold or supplement or sometimes just make things more interesting. In some cases, the use of visual content is thought to have specific cognitive benefits. For example, contemporary textbooks feature vocabulary lists that use images as a spring board to meaning in the additional language rather than glosses, in order to circumvent translation into the home language first (thereby taking an efficient shortcut from working memory to storable long-term memory). Certainly the the push to augment language teaching with visual dynamism has been a great boon to language learning.
But if we instructors don’t take the essence of multimodality to heart by narrating our visuals regularly and well, or providing meaningful and descriptive AltText on digital images, blind/visually impaired students (and anyone with any temporary or situational challenge to vision, even a glare from a window) will be left by the wayside. By all means, use visuals! Just make sure you’re also giving alternate paths to the same information in another way and not relying on visuals as the sole source of meaning that isn’t replicated elsewhere.
Caitlin Cornell 