The Attitudes of Disabled Students Towards the English Language

Abstract

The thesis in entitled 'A Study on the Attitude of Disabled Students towards Learning the English language was carried out in partial fulfillment of the master's degree in education. The purpose of this study was to find out the attitude of the disabled students of grade nine and ten towards learning the English language. The researcher selected the three higher secondary schools of Pokhara valley where there are different types of disabled students like, physically disabled, blind and deaf are studying. Among them Srijana Residential Higher Secondary School is only one special school in Nepal. But Amersingh Higher Secondary School and Barahi Higher Secondary School are integrated schools for the student who are blind and physically disabled respectively. In this regard, the researcher visited 30 disabled students and he used a set of question consisting of closed ended and open-ended questions to the selected students to collect the data. The collected data were analyzed and interpreted to determine attitudes of disabled students towards learning the English language. The major findings of the study were as follows. All the respondents wanted to learn English as a compulsory subject. Most of the physically disabled and blinds students wanted to have the physical infrastructure of the school modified. All the physically disabled and blind students were satisfied with the teaching methods used by English language teachers, his behaviour and behaviour of the non-disabled students. But the deaf students were not satisfied with the teaching methods used by English language teacher and they had no experience of teaching English language with non-disabled students. It was also found that all the physically disabled and blind students were in favour of lecture and discussion methods. But deaf students were in favour of role play method. All the blind students complained that it was hard to read the pictures by Braille and similarly deaf students complained that there were not sufficient signs to learn the English language rather than the Nepali language. The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter one introduces the study in terms of general background, review of related literature objectives of the study and significance of the study. Chapter two deals with methodology applied to carry out the research work. It consists of sources of data, sample population and sampling procedure, tools for data collection and limitations of the study. Chapter three presents the analysis and interpretation of the data collected from the respondents. Chapter four presents the findings recommendations and pedagogical implications of the research. Lastly, the references and appendices form the concluding part of the thesis.