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Authors: Mona Kamel Hassan
Keywords: diverse leaners, methods of teaching, educational material, foreign languages
Abstract: One of the great challenges facing foreign language (FL) teachers is to teach a class involving diverse learners. Diversity is represented in students' cognitive abilities, intellectual abilities, cultural backgrounds, motivation, prior knowledge, and skills, learning styles and interests and needs in the classroom. As a teacher of Arabic as a foreign language (AFL), the presenter’s classroom observation supports many teachers and researchers concerned about obstacles hindering the teaching and learning processes of diverse learners. Examples of these concerns are; what are the teaching strategies/approaches teachers should employ to grant the high quality of education? In which tasks or activities should diverse learners engage to best achieve progress in the target language? How can the educational curriculum be developed/adapted to meet the different needs of diverse learners? Thus, the purpose of the current presentation is to share the presenter’s experience in teaching the integrated language skills; reading, writing, listening and speaking, to diverse AFL learners in their high intermediate and advanced language proficiency levels. She adopted the universal design for learning (UDL) framework, developed by Rose and Meyer, which is a tool to meet the various needs of diverse learners. It states the importance of enabling the entire diverse students to gain skills, knowledge as well as enthusiasm to learn through the employment of teaching methods that respond to students' individual differences. Within the UDL framework as well as the above-stated concerns, first, the presenter made the language curriculum vivid and attractive to inspire students' learning and to keep them engaged in their learning process. Instead of imposing an educational material that might be boring or irrelevant to students' interests, the entire students were encouraged to suggest topics of their interest; political, social, cultural, etc. In class, and under the presenter’s guidance, students dig into these topics to find solutions for the tackled issues while working with their peers. Second, to gain equal opportunities to demonstrate learning, students were assigned to play different roles and to perform different tasks, reflecting and sharing their diverse interests and cultural backgrounds with their peers. Third, interactive collaborative activities through technology were also developed to facilitate students-students communication and students-teacher communication as well as to increase comfort in a diverse learner classroom. Detailed samples of class activities developed for the purpose of teaching these diverse learners are also provided for illustration. It is worth to mention that the presenter’s experience in teaching diverse learners supports what was stated in the Language Teaching Album (2009-2011:228). By grasping students' characteristics, "teachers can turn learner diversity into an asset by capitalizing on their different talents, interests, backgrounds brought to the classroom setting". Thus, the presenter believes that sharing her experience in teaching diverse learners will help FL teachers to develop a better understanding to meet their students' diverse needs. She concludes with Brown's (2015:3) quotation: "Providing students with new passions is the best part of teaching".