Presented at ISEC 2000

Do Phonetic Languages Help Hearing-Impaired Children With Reading Comprehension?

Urmit Girgin

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a survey into the reading assessment of Turkish hearing-impaired children. The study aims to compare teachers' assessment practice against comprehension assessment based on a procedure of retelling. The design of the study is descriptive research of 63 fourth and fifth year hearing-impaired students placed in integration and special education classes.

Turkish is a phonetic language, providing an enormous advantage for the normal developing child learning to decode and read written text. When the hearing-impaired child learns how to decode the written text, the same classroom teacher assumes that this child also has learnt how to read and as a result, comprehend.

The results indicated that the students' reading comprehension scores obtained by retelling procedures were significantly different from teachers' assessment who accepted decoding as reading. In this context, it is extremely important for classroom teachers to be aware of the limitations hearing impairment brings to language development and therefore where hearing-impaired students are concerned, assessment of reading comprehension should be dealt with great care, especially where phonetic languages are concerned.

Introduction

This study concerns an evaluation of reading comprehension for hearing-impaired children in a phonetic language. Turkish is a phonetic language.

There is a direct relationship between the sounds of Turkish and the symbols used to represent them.. It is a language in which the mapping from written symbols to phonemes is nearly one to one. Normally hearing children, once they have learned the sound for each letter, can usually learn how to read within 3-4 months. Because of the ease with which hearing children learn how to read the problems facing hearing-impaired children in learning to read are often underestimated. What is meant by, 'reading'? There are two different processes involved in reading: One is decoding print; the other is attaching meaning to the decoded print.

Decoding

Decoding is the ability to read out loud or recognize a word from its print even when it is not in context. To be able to decode the child needs to know the sound each letter makes (Gough and Tunner, 1986).

Comprehension

Comprehension means to be able to understand the meaning of written words. Comprehension is slowly developed through teaching the child to analyze what he has read and use various strategies such as prediction, inference, and summarization. While developing this ability the reader needs to relate the meaning of the text to his/her own knowledge and experience (Southgate, Arnold and Johnson, 1986).

Language and comprehension

Before normally hearing children learn how to read they have already acquired spoken language, learned most of the rules of their mother tongue and know how to use them. They can share meaning through spoken language in a way that others will understand them and understand what is said to them. A normally hearing child is learning language and has developing language skills before he/she starts to learn to read (Huey 1968).

Children with hearing loss acquire their mother tongue at a slower rate than their normally hearing peers. Because of this, it is natural for children with a hearing loss to have problems in understanding the meaning of written materials. The problem they have with comprehension of written materials is difficult to appreciate in Turkish because of the ease with which children learn how to decode print. A hearing-impaired child who learns sound-letter relationships and who can read out loud is often presumed to be able to understand what he/she reads.

Reading comprehension and its evaluation

Any evaluation a teacher makes of a child's reading skills should correctly reflect the child's abilities. It is important to know what aspect of the child's reading ability you are really testing when completing an evaluation. Rather than just establishing the child's weakest points it is useful to establish what the child can do. It is important that evaluations of reading give information that will facilitate further teaching (Ewoldt, 1978).

When evaluating reading comprehension both standard and non-standard tests can be used. Standard tests are tests which have been standardized so that one child's score can be compared with another's (Rogget, Tutt and Rogget, 1979).

Non-standard testing techniques may include (King and Quigley, 1985; Webster, 1986; Fuchs, Fuchs, Maxwell, 1988):

• Question answering tests
• Oral passage reading measures
• Close technique
• Recall/re-telling procedures

These techniques are used by teachers to establish what stage a child is at in his/her reading (King and Quigley, 1985).

Recall/re-telling procedures allow an evaluation of reading comprehension skills to be made and are also useful for teaching of reading comprehension skills.

As a result of a student recalling and retelling what he/she has read, the number of words, kind of words he/she used, the ideas they have, their understanding of the characters, events and sequences in the text can be observed (Gambel, Kapinus, Koskinen, 1991).

Some methods used for evaluation of reading skills are not always useful in determining the stage at which a child is. Because of this the method chosen to evaluate reading skills is important. The approach a teacher takes to the teaching of reading effects the type of evaluation tool they choose to assess development.

AIM OF THIS STUDY

The purpose of this study is to compare teachers' assessment practice with comprehension measured using a procedure of retelling.

METHOD

Subjects

This research was carried out in Turkey in the city of Eskisehir in special and normal schools. The hearing-impaired children were in primary 4th and 5th grades.

Number of pupils involved in the study and their class

Fifty three children involved in this study were attending special schools, ten children were being educated alongside hearing children in normal schools.

Children selected for the study had no other apparent handicap in addition to hearing impairment. The average hearing loss in the better ear was equal to or worse than 60 dB(ISO) and the children had to be regular hearing aid users. Children with long absences from school were not included in the study.

Materials

1. A questionnaire (completed during interview), designed by the researcher, to determine how the teacher evaluates the hearing-impaired child's reading skills. There is a section on this form where the teacher attributes each child a grade for reading, numbers between 1-5.
2. A text designed by the researcher consisting of 73 words. This passage had easily recognizable names to attract the children's attention (Fry 1997). The passage was easy to understand, interesting and appropriate to the children's level of linguistic development (Thackwell, 1992).
3. A text chosen for each child by the child's own class teacher. The teachers were asked to choose 2 passages which had been used in the classroom and which they believed the child could read and understand. The researcher then chose the simplest of the two to test the child with.
4. A retell evaluation tool designed by C. Ewoldt ( Thackwell, 1992). Although in Turkey asking a child to talk about what he has read is common, to date no formal evaluation tools for this purpose have been developed. However there are guidelines in the curriculum encouraging teachers to ask the child to recount what he has read.

To use Ewoldt's retelling evaluation method, first the teacher must analyze the passage chosen for testing, then attribute 100 points and prepare a retell form. First 25 points are attributed to the characters in the passage. The scores are weighted according to importance, such as:

Lucky 6

Master 4

Young dog 3

Wolf 6

Wife 3

Baby 3

Next, the main events are listed (not more than 10). They are attributed 50 points and scores are weighted according to importance. Finally, details will be added according to the child's contributions, 2 points per detail - maximum of 25 points.

The child is categorized according to the total number of points he/she scores. These categories describe the child's use of reading strategies and typical behaviors: Scores between 25-40 mean some effective use of reading strategies. Such a child will describe several of the characters and may include some information about them but is likely to leave out some important events in the plot and sometimes miss the point of the story.

PROCEDURE

For every child in the study, the class teacher was interviewed and the questionnaire filled in. The grade attributed to the child, by the teacher, for reading was recorded.

After interviewing the teachers the children were split into two groups according to the teacher's philosophy and method of evaluating reading; In the first group named as 'decoding group' teachers accepted that a child can read, once the child can decode. In the second group, named as 'comprehension reading group' the teachers accepted that a child learns to read only when decoding is combined with comprehension. 38 children (%60) were placed in the decoding group, 25 (%40) children in the comprehension reading group. t-test was carried out to determine whether or not there was a significant difference in level of hearing loss, intelligence, amount of time spent in school and socio-economic status between the children in the two different groups. To investigate socio-economic status the Fisher Probability Test was used.

Both texts, one prepared by the researcher, one provided by the class teacher, were analyzed and a retell evaluation form was prepared for each.

The researcher then worked individually with each child. After introducing the content of the passage each child was asked to read the text both out loud and then silently. After this the child was asked to retell what he had read. Once a character was mentioned by the student, the researcher asked open ended questions to encourage the student to think more about the important aspects of the story. As the child retold the researcher awarded points on the pre-prepared retell form. The session was also recorded (audio- visual). After the recorded material had been transcribed, the researcher checked the initial scoring. The same procedure was carried out for the text provided by the class teacher.

RESULTS

From the group of 38 (%60) children whose teachers accepted that they could read because they could decode, according to the retell evaluation, %98 used reading strategies ineffectively or in a limited way. They left out most of the events in the story, usually missed the point of the story and told very little about the characters or they left out some important events in the plot, sometimes missed the point of the story but did manage to describe several of the characters and sometimes included some information about them. The remaining %2 had moderately effective use of reading strategies. They usually included major event in the story generally understood the point of the story, described many of character (Table 1).

Table 1. Showing the scores obtained by children in the decoding group for the text prepared by the researcher on the retell evaluation form

From the group of 25 (40%) children whose teacher's only accepted that a child could read when decoding was combined with comprehension, according to the retell evaluation 76% had moderately effective or highly effective use of reading strategies. They usually included major events in the story, generally understood the point of the story and described many of the characters or included most of the important event usually understood the point of the story, described important characters and how they change. The remaining 24% included some children who had ineffective use of reading strategies and some who had limited use of reading strategies. They all tended to miss the point of the story, leave out most the events and retell very little about characters (Table 2).

Table 2. Showing the scores obtained by children in the comprehension reading group for the text prepared by the researcher on the retell evaluation form

A t-test was used to compare the grades, awarded by the teachers for each child with the scores obtained in the retell evaluation (Table 3).

For children in the decoding group there was a significant difference between the grades awarded by the teacher and the scores obtained on retell evaluation.

Table 3. Comparing grades awarded by teachers with scores on retell evaluation for the decoding group

The grades awarded by the teachers were found to be significantly higher than the scores obtained in the retell evaluation.

For the comprehension reading group, no significant difference was found between the grades awarded by the teachers and the retell scores. They were similar (Table 4).

Table 4. Comparing grades awarded by teachers with scores on retell evaluation for the comprehension reading group

The statistical analyses carried out to investigate differences between the 2 groups showed no significant difference between degree of hearing loss, intelligence and socio- economic status.

A significant difference was found between the length of time spent in school. The children in the comprehension group had spent a longer time in school.

DISCUSSION

For the children whose teachers had accepted reading as just a matter of decoding, the children were found to have ineffective reading strategies.

For the children whose teachers accepted reading as decoding combined with comprehension, the children were found to have moderately effective or highly effective reading strategies.

Research on decoding has shown that for hearing children decoding is not the only factor to be considered in the teaching of reading. When decoding develops alongside comprehension skills then reading skills evolve. Certainly, decoding is a very necessary element to reading but by itself is not enough (Gough and Tunner 1986; Smith, 1988: Ulug, 1083; Oney and Goodman, 1984).

For hearing-impaired children learning how to read, as well as learning the sounds attached to a symbol they need to attach meaning to what they read (Hirsh- Pasek and Treiman,1982; Yurkovski and Ewoldt, 1986; Webster,1986).

In this study the retell scores for the 2 groups were found to be very different, however when differences between the 2 groups were investigated the only significant difference was in length of time spent in school.

Reading is dependent on experience and linguistic ability (Ostern, 1978; Moyle, 1982; Webster, 1986). It is known that cognitive and linguistic skills are a necessary precursor to reading. Children who have spent a longer time in school will have had more opportunity to develop their cognitive and language skills. In this study nearly all of the children in the reading comprehension group had been attending an auditory-oral school since a young age. This school programme includes intervention from diagnosis onwards, parent guidance, nursery and kindergarten programs. When hearing-impaired children are diagnosed at an early age and placed in a language enabling environment where emphasis is placed on development of listening and spoken language skills there is a positive effect on later development of reading skills (Lewis,1996, Geers and Moog,1989, Robertson and Flexer,1993). The children in the decoding group probably had poorer reading skills because they started school at a later age, their families did not receive effective guidance, their language development was slower, they were taught in a different way and their teachers' method of evaluating reading was insufficient.

Strategies used by hearing-impaired children to read are the same as those used by hearing children, however as the language development of a hearing-impaired child is slower than that of a hearing child, they are not as well able to use these strategies (Ewoldt, 1978).

When the teachers of children in the decoding group were assigning grades they only concerned themselves with the child's ability to decode print. The retell evaluation however was concerned with reading comprehension skills. Because of this there was a big discrepancy between the scores obtained on each measure. On the other hand the teachers of the comprehension reading group when assigning grades were measuring similar skills to those measured in the retell evaluation. Because of this the scores obtained on each of the measures were found to be similar.

It is recognized that decoding and comprehension skills are different from each other. When this difference is acknowledged by teachers they can change their methods of teaching reading to include work on comprehension (Pazzoglia, Cornoldi and Tressoldi, 1993). In this study the teachers of the comprehension group were aware of the significance of comprehension skills and this was reflected in the grades they awarded. The grades for the comprehension reading group were lower than the grades awarded to children in the decoding group.

Because Turkish is a phonetic language, both hearing and hearing-impaired children learn how to decode print quickly. This may lead the teacher to think that the child can read and not to realize that the child may have problems deriving meaning from what he/she reads.

CONCLUSION

As language delay is common to most hearing-impaired children it is important to keep in mind that hearing-impaired children learning to read a phonetic script are likely to learn sound symbol relationships before being able to attach much meaning to the script. Because of this it is vital for teachers to concentrate on developing comprehension skills as well as just teaching how to decode. During tasks designed to strengthen comprehension the teacher should guide the child to use various strategies. To ensure comprehension, it is important that the texts chosen by teachers are appropriate to the child's level of linguistic competence. As a prerequisite to reading parents and teachers need to concentrate on creating the type of environment for the hearing-impaired child where he/she will be able to develop language skills.

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Index