Adapting oral assessment for a student with hearing loss
Ms. Behera teaches Class X Telugu at a mixed school in Bhubaneswar. One student, Rina, has moderate hearing loss and uses a hearing aid; she lip-reads when the speaker faces her. The class is preparing a 10-mark oral presentation on “మాతృభాష ప్రాముఖ్యం”. The room has ceiling fans and an adjacent corridor, and group rehearsals become noisy. Rina’s written Telugu is strong, but she misses final verb endings in peer feedback and speaks softly. The department requires all students to do an individual oral presentation; the rubric weights pronunciation, fluency, content and audience engagement. Ms. Behera has two weeks and can use one co-teacher for two periods. She must decide whether to exempt Rina, give a different task, or adapt the existing one without lowering the standard.
1. Should Rina be exempted from the oral presentation? Decide, and justify using the purpose of the assessment and the constraints in the setup.
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Exemption is not the best first response. The assessment’s purpose is to judge whether students can organise and deliver a short Telugu argument orally; Rina’s strong writing does not prove that, and exempting her would remove evidence the department needs. A different task would also lower the standard if it replaced oral delivery with written work.
Adaptation is more defensible because the barrier is largely environmental and access-related, not a lack of Telugu competence. Rina speaks softly and misses final verb endings in noisy peer feedback, which points to acoustics and reception, not to an inability to present. The teacher should keep the same content, the same 10-mark weight and the same broad criteria, but adjust the conditions: a quiet room, face-to-face positioning, a microphone if available, and a small audience rather than a noisy full class. The two co-taught periods can be used for rehearsal and for training peers to face Rina when speaking. The standard remains oral presentation; only access changes.
2. Design the accommodations and the revised rubric. Explain which rubric criterion you would reword and why.
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Accommodations should include: presenting in a quiet room with fans switched off or reduced; standing where Rina can see the teacher’s and audience’s faces; using a microphone or speaking from a fixed position; allowing a printed outline or cue cards; giving extra rehearsal with the co-teacher; and using a small, familiar audience. Peer feedback should be written or given face-to-face, not called from across a noisy room.
The rubric should keep content, organisation, fluency and audience engagement, but reword pronunciation as intelligibility and clarity. This matters because “pronunciation” can slide into a native-like accent standard, which is not the point of a Telugu oral presentation and is unfair when hearing loss affects self-monitoring. Intelligibility asks whether the audience can follow the words and meaning. Fluency can be judged with allowance for paced delivery. Audience engagement can be judged through eye contact, signposting and response to questions, not through volume alone. The marks remain out of 10, and the descriptors are written before Rina presents.
3. Peer rehearsal is causing Rina to miss final verb endings. What should Ms. Behera change in the peer-feedback routine, and how will she know the change is working?
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The peer routine should be structured so that Rina can see and hear the feedback. Ms. Behera can use triads with a fixed speaker position: the speaker faces Rina, the room is quiet, and the third student writes the feedback on a form. Peers should give one content comment and one language comment, with the exact sentence quoted. Rina should not be asked to catch rapid, overlapping comments from the back of the room.
The teacher can check whether the change is working by collecting the feedback forms and comparing them with Rina’s own corrections. Evidence would be: Rina identifies the final verb endings in a recorded or face-to-face replay; peers write specific comments rather than vague ones; and Rina’s rehearsal delivery becomes clearer without reducing her content. If she still misses endings, the issue may be her own monitoring, so the co-teacher can give a short individual session on verb endings in her presentation script. The test is not louder praise but observable improvement in the targeted skill.