Project work management addressing the needs of BVI learners of EFL

The need for social inclusion and access to education for children with disabilities has necessitated inclusive education. Its implementation implies the ability of mainstream educators to teach learners with special needs effectively. While special schools have accumulated considerable experience in this field, mainstream teachers generally do not have the required professional training to teach disabled students inclusively. So there is a growing need for pre-service and in-service teacher education programs that specifically address teaching disabled learners inclusively. The need has been emphasized by the Federal

State Education Standards, which require that school/university curricula should be adapted for impaired learners.

The Department of Linguistics and Linguacultural Studies of the Institute of Foreign Languages of Moscow City Pedagogical University (MCU) faced the problem when providing pre-service EFL teacher education training to a blind student inclusively. So the Department has decided to make its contribution to effective inclusive education by combining defectology expertise with methods of teaching English as a foreign language.

The project “Teaching English to Blind and Visually Impaired Students”

was launched by MCU in 2013. It has acquired additional international dimension by joining the international project “Equal Opportunities: Teaching English to Blind and Visually Impaired Students in Russia” (BVI-Project), which helps to explore both international and national experience in the field.

To meet the objectives of introducing lessons and activities that are developmentally appropriate and that cater to BVI EFL learners’ characteristics the Department has been conducting research into best practices of in-service EFL teacher education programs around the world. An associated “EFL Novice Teachers’ Training” project was launched as a regular series of webinars run by Russian and American experts in the area. MCU has organized and hosted three international conferences “Modern Foreign Language Inclusive Education: Challenges and Solutions” held on April 24, 2015, April 22, 2016, April 28, 2017.

Using the experience of arranging an annual Moscow city contest of school English projects MCU has held three similar contests named “Breakthrough: New Challenges” of English projects for BVI EFL learners throughout Russia with Kazan, Lipetsk, Moscow, Orenburg, Saransk, Ufa, Yakutsk and others participating. The idea has been found appealing by both BVI teachers and learners that is proved by the yearly increase in the number of participants.

The focus of this research is on developing educators’ project work management competence in order to increase the achievements of all their students, no matter what their health background is.

The purpose of this study is therefore to find out whether the implementation of adaptive teaching techniques and the accommodation of learning activities different from those that predominantly rely upon visual clues (such as project-making tasks, for instance) are an efficient way of teaching English as a foreign language to BVI students of all ages and levels.

The competence required for successful project work management is more or less a combination of various competences, i.e.

critical and creative thinking, project implementation competence, IT competence, etc. This article aims to research educator’s competences needed to organize and monitor blind and visually impaired students’ school research and project work in order to make the process of being academically educated active, productive and effective. Some aspects of project work management, including digital tools that can be applied, are explored further.