The following are my issues.
THE TARGET STUDENTS: a group of Year 6 students (children aged 11-13) with hearing or/and speaking difficulties picked from different classes according to a better perfomance of ICT and English skills as well as motivation to gain new skills. They are in their 6th year of EFL learning. Their knowledge of EFL should be in between the A2 and B1 level but their skills are below. They attend English classes 3 times a week for 45 minutes. Children in my school generally come from a poor social and educational background and usually lack the support of their parents/guardians.
THE ISSUE: Issues are various. They stretch from lack of basic skills-reading, writing, listening and speaking and lower order thinking skills to more complexed skills and higher order thinking skills. The way the language is mainly taught in Croatia and the way the books represent the language doesn't help. The skills to be gained are taught separately when they should be integrated and organized around certain topic guided through chosen instructional methods. The curriculum is intensive and the development of grammar skills is crucial. Other things are related to our culture. Students are not used to asking questions and critically think as they are afraid of the failure of being wrong. Other problems are common to all non-English speaking countries such as a flaw of meaningful authentic language, lack of student motivation to learn EFL (as they don't feel they need to learn EFL); not using English outside the class; use of mother tongue; lack of communication in EFL, etc.
THE SPEIFIC NEEDS OF MY PUPILS: As I have already said, my students are with speaking and hearing difficulties. Most of them don't suffer of hearing impairments. To simplify, they can hear but have difficulties in understanding of what's being said, both in mother tongue and EFL. As such, they need the support of intergraded visual-audio aids. What's more a great deal of students have short concentration span and need to be constantly reminded what they're doing (at the time of doing it). This can be done just by simply supplying them with materials of a strong audio-visual background. Learning in visual, kinaesthetic and audio way is also of a great value. For example, when they misinterpret the sound/word/sentence if they are reminded by what they're body is doing at the moment they'll be able to learn/memorise easily. This is just to give you a clue what my priorities in teaching are. My students also lack the need to collaborate and learn from each other. The use of the Internet for educational purposes needs to be stressed out. I wish to guide them in this direction as the Tools on the Internet can help me finding more appropriate learning ways for my students' specific needs. Other problems concern my student's background and lack of their parents' support. Writing homework is another issue as they simply aren't brought up to the importance of doing it. What's more, they are not 'very ICT skilled' partly because of their special needs but mainly because of their lack of experience.
I, as a teacher, also need to be more specific in setting my learning objectives as well as organizing my materials(I sometimes have problems with narrowing down the selection). Keeping track of their work is sometimes hard and I believe different platforms will make my job easier and in accordance, more transparent to my students.
TECHNOLOGY: I feel that web 2.0 technologies can greatly assist us. All the learner-centred approaches provided via 2.0 tools could easily work for my students. I believe that my students will find this way of learning more interesting although we might experience various disadvantages such as they don't show interest in understanding the need to implement modern/innovative ways of teaching/learning.
