Ho Chi Minh City — A seven-year-old boy with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in Hoa Binh Village, for disabled children and Agent Orange victims, was attracted by an electronic dictionary and did something he had never done before – asked his teacher about words and repeated them afterwards.
Le Minh Thanh had been attracted by the illustrations in the first-grade dictionary, Dr Nguyen Thi Ly Kha, the teacher, explained. The dictionary is helping him overcome his learning disability and increase his vocabulary, the deputy head of HCM City Pedagogy University's primary education faculty and the compiler of the dictionary, said. Kids like him do not have the opportunity for much contact with people outside and their vocabulary is normally stunted, she explained:
‘The dictionary will be a means to teach words to children with disabilities, including neurologically-impaired children.’
The country has nearly 400,000 neurologically-impaired children and 150 schools for them. Teaching them is a hard task because there are few teaching aids available, she said. In Viet Nam, they are taught with textbooks and other aids used to teach normal children. The pictures in textbooks do not enable these children to imagine things nor do they attract them much.
There has been no research done in the country into using IT to teach neurologically-impaired children. Thus, when Pham Hai Le, one the students at the university, suggested compiling the dictionary especially for neurologically-impaired children, Dr Nguyen jumped at the idea and worked with her students on it. The dictionary, in CD form, has two parts – one with pictures and the other with videos to illustrate the words.
Kha said there were around 2001 of the former and 101 of the latter.
Picture perfect
Kha and her three students, Pham Hai Le, Do Minh Luan, and Huynh Nguyen Thuy Dung, made a list of words, explained their meaning, found pictures and shot videos, and wrote the software themselves after extensive research. The content is based on the syllabus for neurologically-impaired kids at primary and first-grade levels, Kha explained.
The advantages the dictionary offers are that anyone with basic computer knowledge can use it whilst kids' teachers and parents can edit it themselves. It took two years to compile the dictionary and they are still adding words and ironing out problems, Kha said.
The dictionary won the top prize at the 2009 Eureka Scientific Research Students Awards and a second prize at the 2009 Creative Technology Awards, both in HCM City. It is being used at some primary schools in HCM City and Dak Lak Province's Buon Ma Thuot City where neurologically-impaired students study together with normal children.
The schools in HCM City include Ho Thi Ky Primary School in District 10, Nguyen Thien Thuat Primary School in District 3, and Tran Quoc Toan Primary School in District 5. The dictionary can also be used to teach ethnic minority students for whom Vietnamese is not the mother tongue.
Funds Shortage
Tran Thi Kim Lan, a teacher at Nguyen Thien Thuat Primary School who uses the dictionary, said: ‘It is very good and helpful.’
Her students are attracted by the pictures and videos and it makes them interested in learning and helps them remember. It also helps her physically because she does not have to speak as much as she normally does when teaching neurologically-impaired students, she said.
Lan hoped Kha and her students will compile similar dictionaries for students from the third to fifth grades. Kha wants to but said it will be difficult because of a shortage of funds. She can only do it if she gets assistance from city authorities and other sources, she said.
Source: Vietnam News 6th July 2010
http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/Social-Isssues/201254/
E-dictionaries-help-disabled-children.html
