Many countries have incorporated mandatory English as a foreign language (EFL) classes into the curricula at all levels of their education systems, from elementary school to university. In parallel with this trend, the global disability rights movement continues to advocate for equal (as opposed to separate) access to public services, including education. These efforts have catalyzed into a global trend towards the inclusion of students with disabilities at every level of the education system in many countries. Yet, how students with disabilities learn foreign languages in classroom settings remains poorly understood. In this presentation, I will make a modest attempt at addressing this gap, by presenting the results of a study conducted in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) class at a middle school for the visually impaired in Japan. This study sought to address the research focus: what are the endogenous practices that allow blind, Japanese EFL students to achieve socio-cognitive alignment? Audio and video recordings of EFL classes were transcribed and analyzed using conversation analysis. Interviews with the teacher and students were also conducted. In this presentation, endogenous practices involving peripersonal perception, joint imagination of kinesthetic frames of reference, and the ways that features in the soundscape contribute to the public construction of classroom activities will be discussed. Such interactional resources can provide evidence for the various ways that interlocutors extend and embody cognitive states in relationship to their environment and to one another; thereby providing evidence for an inter-corporeal sense-field, or an intersubjectivity, through which to communicate a range of conceptual, and preconceptual information. Explicating how the congenitally blind learn to communicate in their L2 could have implications for how all L2 learners make use of multi-modal sensory information in the process of SLA.
