An Analysis of the Visually-Impaired Students’ Satisfaction on English for the Blind Application in Thai Academic Contexts

Abstract

Thailand has been categorized as a country with low English language proficiency over the past several years in ranking. Moreover, there were obstacles to educate students with disabilities principally in learning English owing to the fact that the office of the basic education commission lacked educational facilities for students with disabilities especially for visually-impaired students. For this reason, the researcher developed an application named “English for the Blind” to assist visually-impaired students in grades 10 to 12 in learning English for communication according to the indicators of 4 strands of learning areas of foreign languages contained in the Ministry of Education’s Basic Education Core Curriculum (A.D. 2008), and conducted this study to study satisfaction of the students towards the application. The population for this research project comprised 99 visually-impaired students without additional overlapping disabilities in grades 10 to 12 in the 2021 academic year, chosen by random sampling. This study conducted from August to December 2021, collected through the use of  application and an endline survey. This study used the 5-point Likert scale and the score assessment criteria of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) to interpret the scores. Data were analyzed by mean, standard deviation, frequency, and percentage. The research findings indicated that they were highly satisfied with the content and activities in each lesson, which they felt were appropriate for the learner's levels ( =4.43) (S.D.=0.67), and functioned to support the use for the visually-impaired students ( =3.95) (S.D.=0.60). In conclusion, the application literally assisted students in learning English for communications because of its contents and functions, which helped level up the students’ English skills.