Inclusive education is much spoken about nowadays. The Udmurt State University is also putting efforts into making its educational environment suitable for people with special needs.
One of the recent breakthroughs is a textbook for visually-impaired students “Brush up your English grammar” produced by Andrei Ivanov, associate professor teaching English for special purposes, and Aleksey Olenchikov, master student at the Institute of Mathematics, IT and Physics. The online version of the course was released in April 2021.
Andrey got inspired with the idea of the textbook 5 years ago when he started teaching his first visually impared student Dmitry Druzhinin. First, Dmitry studied using standard textbooks which he adapted to his needs with help of tablet PC and ‘text-to-audio’ software such as JAWS and TalkBack. These programs are rather costly, however. Besides, they lack some features essential for learning foreign languages. For example, they cannot supply right verb forms or find a required page in textbook, or differentiate between words with similar pronunciation (be-bee).
On the second stage, Andrey’s linguistic concepts had to be digitized. It took him 3 years to find an expert who would develop original software product. Aleksey Olenchikov, a second-year master student, got challenged by the task and managed to live out Andrey’s dream of textbook for students with special needs. “Brush up your English grammar” is an exclusive product of its kind as no other online programs for studying English as a foreign language have been available for visually disabled people before. With this textbook inclusive principle works perfectly as long as students with special needs can study in regular groups and follow regular curriculum.
Anybody can access this learning tool online free of charge. The authors are interested in humanitarian and pedagogical value rather than commercial value of the product. The new English Grammar course can potentially help many people and it has already been on demand both in Russia and CIS counties.
All the best to the project having big educational and social significance!
