How can we make our company more accessible for the disabled?

Level: Intermediate- Advanced

Time: 90 minutes to 120 minutes

Language Focus: Comparatives and superlatives, making suggestions, giving opinions,

agreeing and disagreeing, talking about the future (plans and predictions).

Skills: Listening to an authentic video clip, participating in a decision-making meeting.

1. Start by giving the learners a brainteaser to warm them up and capture their interest:

Here is a brainteaser for you: I´m thinking about a group who are the largest minority in the
world. Some people are members of this minority from birth, but anyone could become a
member of this group at some point in their lives. What group of people am I thinking about?

Give them some time to think about their answer and discuss it with a partner. Then ask
them to take a guess. This minority is, of course, the disabled.

Tell the learners that the focus of this lesson will be on disabled access and they will
consider how their company could become more disabled-access friendly. Ask them what
the benefits of becoming disabled-access friendly could be for a company and for theirs
specifically.

2. The next stage is to show them a video from World Focus entitled: Greeks face daily
challenges getting around, which you can find at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5UErykzKmY&feature=player_embedded

Tell them that they are going to watch a video about a disabled person´s journey to and from
their workplace in Greece and then as a pre-watching activity intended to build empathy, ask
them to first think about their own journey to work. Ask them to consider the following points
whilst discussing their journey with a partner or in a small group:

- What is the most annoying part of your journey to work?

- What holds you up on your journey to work?

- What would improve your experience of travelling to work?

Depending on the group, it may be necessary to clarify vocabulary items in the questions, e.g.
annoying and hold up.

3. After gathering some feedback from the group and writing their ideas up on the board or
flipchart, ask them to repeat the activity, but this time put themselves in the place of a
disabled person and consider what would be the most annoying part of their journey, what is
likely to hold them up the most and what would improve their experience of travelling to work.
Encourage them to take into account a range of disabilities, not only disabilities which leave
people wheelchair-bound, but also visual and hearing impairment. You could ask each pair
or group to consider the three questions from the point of view of someone with a different
form of disability.
4. The next step is to get the video ready and ask the learners to consider the following
questions as they watch:

- What is the most annoying part of Anna´s journey to work?

- What holds her up the most?

- What would improve her experience of travelling to work?

Pre-teach words which are likely to be unfamiliar, but which are essential to the topic of
disabled access, e.g. ramp and pavement/ sidewalk. Tell the learners that they should not
worry if they do not understand every word spoken in the video. The most important thing is
that they can understand enough to be able to respond to the three questions above. In other
words, this exercise is about listening for gist, not for detail.

Ask them to feed back their responses to the three questions after watching the video.

5. You can then move onto a short group discussion of similarities and differences between
the situation in Greece and that in the country or countries the members of your group come
from. You could start them off by giving an example of a comparison between Greece and
the country you come from or live in, e.g. Pavements in the UK are usually wider than
pavements in Greece, so it is easier for disabled people to use them. You could compile a list
of the learners´ answers on the board or flipchart in the form of a table.

6. Now move on to the final stage of the lesson where the learners take part in a meeting
role-play. The aim of the meeting is to discuss how the company where the participants work
could improve its disabled-access. Depending on the size of the group, decide whether the
whole group should participate in the meeting at the same time or if you should have two
meetings taking place simultaneously.

7. Ask them to come up with four points which they would put on the agenda of a meeting on
this topic. Depending on the group, it may be necessary to guide the learners through this
process by encouraging them to

i. Identify the problems that their company building(s) currently pose(s) to disabled-access

ii. How these problems could be solved/ what strategies could be implemented to overcome
difficulties.

iii. What time-scale they would be dealing with.

iv. Consider the cost of the improvements.

8. Give members of the group different roles to take on during the meeting role-play.

- Mr/ Ms Money (focused on the costs)

- Mr/ Ms Put-it-off-until-tomorrow (thinks that the improvements can wait)

- Mr/ Ms Urgency (thinks better disabled access should not have to wait any longer)

- Mr/ Ms Positive (is sure that his/her company can successfully implement better
disabled access)
- Mr/ Ms Sceptic (doubts whether better disabled access can become a reality)

If there are more than five people taking part in one role-play, you could give the same role to
more than one participant and in doing so influence the dynamic of the role-play.

Tell them they must reach a decision at the end of the meeting (give them 10-15 minutes for
the role-play), by which point they should be able to tell you:

- What changes they are going to make.

- Over what timeframe the changes will be implemented.

- Where they will get the money for the changes from.

9. Before they start the role-play, quickly recap useful phrases for taking part in meetings and
make a list of them on your board or flipchart under the following headings:

- Asking for opinions

- Giving opinions

- Agreeing

- Disagreeing

- Making a suggestion

The assumption is that participants will have already covered this language to some extent in
previous lessons or courses.

10. Learners role-play the meeting while the teacher makes notes on their use of English and
use of language appropriate for taking part in meetings. Give them some feedback on their
performance as a group. This could be done orally at the end of the lesson or written up in a
document or PowerPoint slide which the learners receive by email or which is projected onto
the classroom wall at the start of the next lesson. If there´s still time remaining at the end of
the lesson, you could ask to look into the future and discuss any changes which their
company is likely (or unlikely as the case may be) to actually make to improve disabled-
access.