- Author: Lilik Untari
- From: Doctoral Student at Faculty of Cultural Sciences of Gadjah Mada University
Abstract:
Hearing impairment causes deaf children to differ from their peers. Their unique experience in acquiring the language might influence language development in deaf children. Many studies found that deaf children have low literacy. Most of researches highlight the benefit of sign language for deaf literacy. However there are still limited studies on deaf children who are exposed to spoken language. This research is conducted to explore the written text comprehension of deaf children’s who are exposed to spoken language. It is a case-study research by applying guantitavie and qualitative method in analyzing the data. The data are reading components include: children’s sentence structure comprehension and children’s reading comprehension assessed by Barrett taxonomy. The subjects are 5 pre-lingually deaf children from middle School special education of YRTRW Surakarta and 20 fourth grade elementary hearing students. The data are collected through comprehension test and interview. The result shows that deaf children’s comprehension score can be classified into two groups: (1) deaf children scored equal to 4th grade hearing students and (2) deaf children scored lower than 4th grade hearing students. The students scored lower than hearing students known to have lower score on vocabulary knowledge and syntax. Although they have lower score, deaf children have the same pattern of comprehension with the hearing students. Among the five levels of Barrett’ reading taxonomy: literal, reorganization, inferential, evaluation, and appreciation, deaf children and the 4th grade hearing students perform well on literal comprehension. Meanwhile good deaf reader and 4th grade students can cope inference task better than poor deaf reader. The lowest score obtained by poor deaf reader is on evaluation task. This tendency is the same as the score of the 4th hearing students. This brings implication that although deaf children’s comprehension is lag behind the hearing peers, they undergo the same phase as the hearing one. The key aspect of text comprehension is comprehension of sequence.
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