Onomatopoeia and Direct Speech on the Narratives of Deaf and Hearing Students

Abstract

This comparative linguistic scrutiny attempts to reveal the phenomena of onomatopoeia and direct speech on the Indonesian narrative compositions produced by deaf and hearing students. Eight personal narratives about being chased by a dog were elicited from eight deaf senior high school students and 12 were gathered from their hearing counterparts of the same level. Both data sets were analysed for their adoption of onomatopoeia and direct speech. The qualitative analysis reveals that none of onomatopoeia and direct speech was employed in the writings of all deaf students. In the stories of their hearing counterpart, 7 of 12 narratives contain onomatopoeia and 4 contain direct speech. The onomatopoeia covers the sounds of animal, human, and tool while the direct speech consists of conversations and one-way comments made by participants involved in the stories. The findings of this study emphasise that deaf student writers in comparison with their hearing counterparts were less likely to incorporate onomatopoeia and direct speech into their writings. It is speculated that the absence of both language features in the narrative compositions of deaf students correlates with their inaccessibility to the direct verbal language. Though the findings of the current study are not conclusive due to its specific context and limited numbers of participants, at least they are expected to contribute to the language teaching and learning especially related with the development of written literacy for deaf student writers. Language teaching and learning in the classroom is expected to assist deaf students in employing onomatopoeia and direct speech in their narratives to make their stories more functional and interesting to read.