Language Equity in Technical Education: A ReadSpeaker Success Story

Springfield Technical Community College (opens in a new tab) (STCC) fills a crucial role in the Massachusetts higher education system. The only technical community college in the state, STCC is located in a diverse community about two hours west of Boston.

The students of STCC, who number at least 4,500 per semester and mostly commute from within eight miles of the college, speak many languages at home. Arabic, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese speakers are strongly represented on campus.

Spanish is the most common first language among the STCC student body, with Hispanic students making up at least 25% of the college’s full-time students. In fact, STCC is an official Hispanic-Serving Institution (opens in a new tab) (HSI), recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

Meanwhile, most of the learning materials in STCC’s classes are in English. The language disparity became a bigger challenge when the 2020 pandemic forced a sudden switch to online classes.

Confronting Language Barriers in Online Education Platforms

Marisha Marks is an instructional designer at STCC, where she helps instructors adopt the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework.

In other words, she helps teachers present learning materials in multiple ways, fitting the style of education to each learner’s unique strengths, needs, and preferences.

That effort includes new approaches to multilingual education, some of which overlap with accommodations for students with disabilities, and both of these areas got tougher when a pandemic suddenly forced classes online.

“During COVID, some of our in-person supports were less available,” Marks said. “Previously, a student might have worked one-on-one with a counselor. But during the pandemic, those interactions were limited.”

Marisha Marks, Instructional Designer at STCC

To live up to the college’s commitment to inclusion, educators needed to bring language support to the new digital learning environment. For STCC, that meant adding tools to the Blackboard learning management system (LMS).

Educators needed digital tools that could help multilingual learners consume English-language course content in a wide variety of other languages. And that course content could include just about anything: lectures, ebooks, PDF articles, classroom chat forums, online assessments, and more.

As Marks discovered, however, the school already had the solution for online language support. It was just labeled as a different type of accommodation.

Multilingual text to speech (TTS) is software that simultaneously translates text between languages and reads it out loud. This proved to be just the tool STCC needed to fully support its multilingual learners in digital learning environments.

As an expert in UDL, Marks found that multilingual TTS tools fit right into the inclusive strategy. Accessible design tends to help all students, with and without disabilities alike. So it’s not surprising that the solution to STCC’s multilingual challenge was hiding in the STCC Office of Disability Services (opens in a new tab).

Springfield Technical Community College acquired two TTS-related tools around the beginning of the pandemic: Anthology Ally and ReadSpeaker.

The former (which used to be called “Blackboard Ally”) is an automated accessibility checker that also provides alternative formats, including multilingual TTS. ReadSpeaker offers a set of dedicated multilingual TTS tools that integrate seamlessly into Blackboard.

At first, STCC staff saw these tools only as accommodations for students with disabilities. They were part of the school’s dedication to compliance with accessibility laws including Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (opens in a new tab), The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (opens in a new tab), and The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (opens in a new tab)

These TTS tools helped students with visual impairments, dyslexia, attention deficits, and learning disabilities succeed at STCC. But Marks saw that multi-language learners could benefit from the combination of translation and TTS, too.

“We first acquired ReadSpeaker tools for accommodations that didn’t have anything to do with language proficiency, because that’s not a designated disability,” Marks said. “But the uses I found are so much broader. When we show faculty TTS with translation, the reaction I get is just a jaw drop.”

Marisha Marks, Instructional Designer at STCC

ReadSpeaker’s multilingual TTS helped in a few ways at once. These tools:

• Instantly improved representation and inclusion for non-native English speakers.
• Allowed students to learn course content without unfair language struggles.
• Helped multi-language learners improve their English while studying any subject.

“If you’re a language learner, having the ability to see the words and hear how they’re pronounced is really part of that learning process,” Marks said.”

Marisha Marks, Instructional Designer at STCC

That’s why, years after STCC re-opened in-person classes, the school continues to offer ReadSpeaker multilingual TTS tools to every student.

Online education never receded to its pre-pandemic levels at STCC (or anywhere else). Marks finds ReadSpeaker multilingual TTS just as useful today as it was at the height of the pandemic.

“Our online offerings have dramatically increased since pre-COVID, and our students love it, because we have so many nontraditional students where the flexibility of an online course or a hybrid course is huge,” Marks said. “The value of multilingual TTS is there, and so we’ve kept it on, even though we now have students in person all the time.”

Marisha Marks, Instructional Designer at STCC

ReadSpeaker’s multilingual TTS isn’t only helpful for online students, however. Today’s in-person classes rely heavily on digital learning and assessment platforms, too. At STCC, every course, online, hybrid, or in-person, has a Blackboard shell. So multi-language learners can access auto-translation and TTS for assignments, assessments, and class materials in any format.

STCC’s relationship with ReadSpeaker didn’t end with the integration of the tool.

A ReadSpeaker Advisory Board now meets regularly with Marks and the STCC team to provide support that STCC staff passes along to their students.

“The collaboration has been great,” Marks said. “It’s really nice to have someone explain the updates as they come, and it feels good to know that somebody is listening and improving the tool in a way that is going to work best on the user side.”

Marisha Marks, Instructional Designer at STCC

Every semester, Marks sees a spike in ReadSpeaker usage as students explore its features, including translation and lifelike multilingual voices.

“Once they explore it, the ones who need it or want it or find it helpful stick with it,” Marks said. “It’s really neat to see that continued use.”

Marisha Marks, Instructional Designer at STCC

Multilingual TTS gives students the power to mold their own learning experiences, including automatic translation into their own strongest language. That makes it a great example of Universal Design for Learning (opens in a new tab), which aims to “change the design of the environment rather than to situate the problem as a perceived deficit in the learner.”

Marks continues to show ReadSpeaker’s multilingual TTS tools to STCC instructors. The results she gets are overwhelmingly positive.

“People are amazed at what ReadSpeaker is able to do,” Marks said. “Seeing a paragraph of text translated and read out loud in the translated language, people say, ‘I didn’t know you could do that. That’s so amazing.’”

Marisha Marks, Instructional Designer at STCC