Improving Visually Impaired Students’ Achievement in Oral English: Can the Descriptive Illustrative Strategy provide Help?

Abstract

Visually impaired students in inclusive classrooms usually find the study of oral English very difficult because the conventional strategy that teachers use in teaching it does not seem to help them to activate the mental imagery necessary to understand the contents, leading to their poor achievements. This study thus explored the efficacy of the descriptive illustrative strategy as a more responsive strategy to the needs of the visually impaired students in oral English. Adopting a quasi experimental design, fifteen visually impaired students from two secondary schools in Enugu State, Nigeria were taught oral English using the descriptive illustrative strategy for the experimental group and the demonstrative illustrative strategy for the control group. The study found significant improvement in the achievement of visually impaired students in the experimental group more than those in the control group.