This past year, my company had the opportunity to meet the request of a learner with a categorical difference in corporeal attributes. As part of our English language platform, we have an assessment to place learners into their respective levels, which includes an oral proficiency exam. In the oral assessment, learners must listen to a set of recorded prompts and record their spoken responses for us to evaluate within the product. The request we received was from a deaf learner who was unable to listen to the prompts, but wanted to take part in the assessment as it would determine his eligibility to be approved for a scholarship through his organization.

Bill Cope explains in this module that when looking at categorical differences in physical attributes, there is a notably wide spectrum of transient abilities in which educators should find ways to negotiate these abilities into mainstream classrooms. As my company’s assessment does not include transcripts for listening prompts, and there is no specific department to address learners of categorical differences in abilities, I was asked to set up a recorded video call with this particular learner, in order to read our prompts for him so that he may lip read and respond orally, allowing us to assess his proficiency via the recording afterwards.

While our inherent product fails to meet the needs of deaf ESL learners, we were absolutely willing to find a way to address this learner’s request so as not to exclude him from the opportunity to be assessed. This experience shed light on ways we can expand our product to be more inclusive to a wider range of abilities on our platform, as well as other categorical differences that we may not currently be prepared for.