The role of sign language in enhancement of communicating skills and academic achievement of hearing impaired children

Abstract

Controverse about the effects which the Sign Language of deaf has on their communicative and educational achievement is the subject of actual research. For the first time the effects of Serbian Sign Language are investigated. The sample was made of 60 subjects. The subjects were children with severe hearing impairments - more than 80 dB - aged 8 to 12 years and divided into a control and an experimental group. Before the beginning, the experimental and the control group were made equal in terms of the degree of hearing loss, communication abilities, IQ, age, sex and school achievement, and after the experiment their communicative ability was retested by means of the Communication Competence Scale and their school achievement was compared. The research scheme applied in the study is an experiment with parallel groups. The experimental group participated in a communication workshop on a daily basis for five months and learned Serbian sign language through various tasks and games. No activities were carried out with the control group. The data were statistically interpreted by means of the repeated measures two-factor analysis of variance. The results confirm that learning and improving Serbian Sign Language has positive effects on the promotion of verbal competence (receptive and expressive), global communicative competence and school achievement. The study has also confirmed that the Communication Competence Scale is valid, reliable and discriminative

An Empirical Verification of the Integral Development Method for Deaf Children

“…It is based on Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development (Phillips, 1969;Piaget, 1968;Piaget & Inhelder, 1986), Hans Furth's papers (1966;1971), Lev Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory (1996), Hans Cassirer's philosophy of symbolical forms (1978) and humanistic and existential personality theories. It is also founded on the results of the psychology of deafness (Levine, 1981;Marschark, 1993;Živković, 1996;Radoman, 2005;Radoman & Nikolić, 2013) that point out the developmental areas where deaf children face difficulties (conservation, abstract thinking, insufficient creativity, weak motivation, low self-esteem, etc.) and those developmental areas that are adequately or highly developed (detailed visual perception, ability to remember movements, certain aspects of non-verbal intelligence, etc.)…”

“…The IDMDC stimulates relevant developmental areas such as cognitive, linguistic, communicational, educational, creative, emotional-social, and conative development (Radoman & Nikolić, 2000b;Nikolić, 2009;Radoman & Nikolić, 2013). Stimulation of these developmental aspects is achieved through group work and workshops involving sign language, play, movement, dramatization, laughter, interesting tasks and group problem situations.…”

“…Stimulation of these developmental aspects is achieved through group work and workshops involving sign language, play, movement, dramatization, laughter, interesting tasks and group problem situations. Work with deaf children takes place in cognitive, communicational, creative, and drama workshops, while work with parents and wider social environment is carried out in a workshop for parents and in a public opinion workshop in line with the social model of disability that focuses on removing social barriers and modelling the environment in accordance to all kinds of disabilities (Radoman, 2011;Radoman, & Nikolić, 2013).…”

“…Different developmental approaches used in work with deaf and hard-of-hearing children resulted in a great number of frequently contradictory rehabilitation and education programmes that have been evolving since the middle of the 18 th century until today (Radoman & Nikolić, 2013). The spirit of the Enlightenment and new ideas of work with deaf children were initiated by Charles-Michel de l'Épée (1712 -1789) and his follower Ambroise Cuccuron Sicard (1742-1822), who recognized sign language as a key component of work with deaf children (Lane, 1984).…”

“…Real and visible changes in work with deaf children first started in the United States of America and then in Europe, when many special schools introduced programmes and procedures including sign language (SL) -as a language that is considered the true verbal language -as well as a wide range of non-verbal models of stimulation of deaf children's development (Klima & Bellugi, 1979). Numerous studies of sign language were initiated later on (De Clerck, 2007;Gregory, Knight, McCracken, Powers & Watson, 1999;Johnson, Liddell & Erting, 1989;Radoman & Nikolić, 2013;Quer & Muller de Quadros, 2015).…”