The purpose of this research is to find out what sentence comprehension strategies are chosen by students with hearing impairment according to semantical restrictions and verbal patterns, and how their sentence comprehension degrees develope.
For t...
The purpose of this research is to find out what sentence comprehension strategies are chosen by students with hearing impairment according to semantical restrictions and verbal patterns, and how their sentence comprehension degrees develope.
For the research, 184 hearing students and 201 students with hearing impairment were observed and all the students with hearing impairment were guaranteed not to have multiple mental retardation and to have abilities to comprehend sentences by their homeroom teachers and Korean language teachers.
In the research, two types of sentences were used such as a weakly semantically restricted sentence and a strongly semantically restricted sentence according to semantical restriction. Both types consisted of 12 sentences respectively. The strongly semantically restricted sentences were made up of meaningfully natural sentences and unnatural sentences according to their semantic relations. On the other hand, the weakly semantically sentences were composed of normal word order sentences and abnormal word order sentences. In both of the types, the sentences contained transitive, causative, and dative verbs according to verb patterns.
The observation method for the test was the picture choosing method that a student reads a sentence and chooses one corresponding picture out of four and marks on it. They were allowed to be fully accustomed to the way of test by solving three exercise sentences before the main test. They were not restricted by time limit.
From the collected data, we output the average percentage of correct answers in each group and analyzed the differences between the groups, in the inter-groups and in the inter-sentences with One-Way ANOVA. The meaningful differences in the inter-groups were analyzed with LSMEANS later. Also, sentence patterns and distribution range were analyzed with χ² inspection.
The followings are the results induced from the research analysis.
First, semantical restrictions affect sentence comprehension of students with hearing impairment.
Hearing students who have high sentence comprehension abilities are little influenced by semantical restrictions because they use syntactic structures, Students with hearing impairment, however, are affected by semantical relations and experiences.
Secondly, the comprehension degrees are different according to verbal patterns. All the students showed the highest correct answer percentage in the transitive verbal sentences. The second was in the dative verbal sentences and the lowest was in the causative verbal sentences. Especially, the students with hearing impairment had difficulties in understanding causative verbal sentences because they needed higher comprehension strategies such as understandings of exact word orders, particles and postpositions.
Lastly, sentence comprehension strategies could be said to take the developmental stages of response->semantic strategy -> word order strategy -> postposition strategy. In the strongly semantically restricted sentences, the students who had high sentence comprehension abilities used syntactic strategies while the students who had low sentence comprehension abilities used semantic strategies. Only 35% of the students with hearing impairment were distributed at the syntactic strategy stage while most of the hearing students were at the same stage.
Concerning to the above results, it could be available to break down the syntactic strategy on the basis of the data in the weakly semantically restricted sentences. In case of hearing students, they achieve complete masteries of sentence comprehension abilities after they become high grade students. Contrarily, students with hearing impairment don't show any differences as they become higher graders and they just stick to the word order strategy even showing responses that they match pictures to word positions visually.
From the induced results, there could be made several proposals for teaching language to students with hearing impairment.
First, when you evaluate the language comprehension abilities of students with hearing impairment, it is more appropriate to divide individual development of sentence comprehension into several stages and evaluate at what stages they are, and use different teaching strategies considering individual differences in language acquisition, rather than to classify the stages according to age or grade and say that he is at the stage of this age or that grade.
Secondly, sentence comprehension education concerning inflection is much more emphasized because students need syntactic approaches as they become higher graders even though they generally understand transitive verbal sentences with ease.
When teaching handicapped children, it is important to consider comprehension strategies as well as sentence types and conditions. The test method of this research would be available in examining what sentence comprehension strategies your students are using.
Lastly, at the school for students with hearing impairment where this research has been implemented, they use oral language and sign language in the low grades. But as grade is higher, sign language is more used.
Therefore, there is a potentiality that sign language oriented interpretations were involved in the interpretations of the sentences in the test. Consequently, we should implement following researches at schools for students with hearing impairment which have oral language oriented education programs and the research results will be valuable resources in teaching language to students with hearing impairment.