I received this question recently, and I thought you might like a peek into my thought process:
If a student has weak eyesight and can’t read letters well, which means the student hardly writes, how should a teacher evaluate the skills?
Well, I’d need more information to offer meaningful advice. I have several curiosities about this scenario, which I’ve shared below. Note: I would not recommend asking some of these questions to students outright; these are my own personal wonderings.
1. Was this difficulty reported by the student? Reported by someone else? Observed by the instructor? Observed by someone else? (Maybe a tutor or conversation partner).
The answer to this question will determine how you move ahead with other questions, especially the next one.
2. Have you had a careful and gentle conversation with the student? What does the student say would be helpful?
(Make sure you’re talking with the student, not around the student.)
3. Has the student had this concern before? What do they do about this difficulty in other parts of their life, in their home language, outside their additional language study?
Arguably, from my view, any coping mechanisms used in the home language should be allowed in the classroom. The example of this I typically give is the idea that if a hard-of-hearing student has to read lips in order to understand conversations in their home language, then they should have the opportunity to read lips in the listening assessment of the language they study as well.
4. What does “weak eyesight” really mean? Is it short or farsightedness? Is it weak muscle tone or visual acuity?
We don’t need to know this concretely or scientifically to be able to help the student. However, there are all kinds of things we can do to help with reading and some of them won’t apply if we don’t understand the actual difficulty.
Actually, a better way to ask this is “What exactly is the difficulty when reading? Are letters moving around? Are they fuzzy?”
5. Does the student use assistive technology? Does magnifying or increasing or decreasing light levels help with the reading at all?
6. Does the student have any suggestions of solutions that have helped before or in other studies?
It’s perfectly fine if students don’t already know what the need, but many times they do. When they do, we should trust them.
7. By “write” do you mean the student has difficulty with handwriting, or with writing in general in the additional language?
If so, you might consider asking the student if being able to type alleviates any of the difficulty. Or, you might consider whether the student could use speech-to-text technology to produce written language from oral input.
8. Go back to the learning outcomes. Do reading and writing always need to be assessed, all of the time? Are there any places where the curriculum might be redesigned so that reading and writing are only happening when it’s absolutely essential to the learning outcomes?
If, in conversations with the student and faculty, it becomes clear that material can’t be made more accessible to the student without disproportionate effort on the student’s part, it might be acceptable according to institutional policy to waive the student out of particular assessments that are based on physical reading ability. IF THAT’S WHAT THE STUDENT WANTS; students shouldn’t be waived out of anything without their consent, in my opinion.
So, what do you think? Did you think of any additional curiosities I didn’t have?
Caitlin Cornell 