International Symposium: Programs: Summary: Session M2B

Teaching English to Czech tertiary level hearing-impaired students is often an uphill struggle, as they lack knowledge to build on. The situation in Czech specialized schools, English-wise, for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, is often not very encouraging. Therefore, teachers at the tertiary level try to look at different aspects of English learning. For deaf Czech students, Czech sign language is their mother tongue. For those without profound hearing loss Czech language is their mother tongue, but many of them are able to communicate in the Czech sign language. All the groups have quite a good knowledge of the Czech language (most of them study the Czech language in the Communication of the Deaf and Deaf Culture Studies). That is the reason why the method of teaching English described in this presentation is based on their knowledge of the Czech language and Czech sign language. One of the most difficult parts for students to grasp is the "flow" of English: i.e. its structure. Therefore, the presentation focuses on teaching English sentence structure in comparison with and in contrast to Czech sign language and the Czech language. To reach better results in sentence-structure comprehension, several special teaching methods and technologies are used in the class and demonstrated in this presentation. These methods and strategies, which include video error corrections and computer-assisted sentence analysis and patterns, can be applied to teaching sentence structure in general, because English language has a rather fixed word order.