Deaf and hearing students' referential strategies in writing: What referential cohesion tells us about deaf students' literacy development

Abstract

The ability to organize the referential content of narrative has usually been investigated as a mark of the development of discourse skills. In this study, the pragmatic use of pronominal and nominal forms of reference in written stories was considered instead as a mark of literacy development in deaf and hearing students. Participants in the study were 17 deaf high-school students, 17 school-age matched hearing controls, and 16 hearing second-graders (novice writers) who were asked to write a picture-story, Frog, Where are you?, for a hearing reader who was unacquainted with it. Results revealed that deaf students appear to use the same variety of referential devices as hearing students when writing and, in most cases, these devices are used appropriately. However, the referential strategies of the deaf students were more nominal and less anaphoric than those of their hearing peers. It is concluded that the referential strategies of deaf writers are only superficially similar to those of hearing novice writers, suggesting that deaf students' referential strategies in writing are not merely the product of a delay in development of discourse skills.

Estímulos visuais e produção escrita de escolares com e sem queixas de alterações na escrita

“…Tal fato pode ocorrer, pois o escritor iniciante escreve como se fala, e na fala a contextualização é dada pela interação simultânea entre o emissor e o receptor. Sendo assim, o papel da escrita não está bem estabelecido e pode gerar o risco de ambiguidade pela ausência ou inadequação de Pontuação (Arfé & Perondi, 2008).…”

Influência do tipo de estímulo visual na produção escrita de surdos sinalizadores sem queixas de alterações na escrita

“…The study also had the intention to possibly validate a writing assessment instrument for this specific population. However, the sample size limitation, also observed in other studies with deaf subjects (13,14) , and the number of studied variables prevented this standardization.…”

“…With that in mind, a study (13) has suggested that the focus of investigation regarding the production of deaf individuals is changed to the analysis of Communicative Competences, which has demonstrated that the difficulties of these subjects are not that different from their hearing peers. The ability to referentially organize the content of narration has been investigated as a mark of the development of competences in the discourse of these individuals.…”

“…In the mentioned study (13) , it was proposed that the linguistic competence might be a good basis for intervention on the development of literacy. Moreover, the authors added the need to develop studies that compare written productions elicited by sequences of images with those based on a non-sequenced image, in order to test the effect of visual stimulus on the discourse of children.…”

How hearing and hearing-impaired children differentiate emergent writing from drawing.

“…Hearing-impaired children's reading and writing skills have been investigated extensively in the school-aged population, consistently revealing low levels of proficiency (Alamargot, Lambert, Thebault, & Dansac, 2006;Antia et al, 2005;Arfé, 2003;Arfé & Boscolo, 2006;Arfé & Perondi, 2008;Banks, Gray, & Fyfe, 1990;Dyer, MacSweeney, Szczerbinski, Green, & Campbell, 2003;Fabbretti, Volterra, & Pontecorvo, 1998;Singleton, Morgan, DiGello, Wiles, & Rivers, 2004;Wauters, van Bon, & Tellings, 2006). However, by comparison, fewer studies have focused on hearing-impaired children's emergent literacy skills or on their early exploration and discovery of the writing system (see Williams, 2004).…”