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A deaf child's language acquisition verified through text retelling.
B Luetke-Stahlman1, C Griffiths, N Montgomery
1Rockhurst College, Kansas City, MO, USA. bluetke@kumc.edu
American Annals of the Deaf
|July 29, 1999
Summary
Adult mediation significantly improved language skills in a deaf second grader during reading retellings. Skills improved with facilitation and were internalized when mediation was withdrawn, showing direct impact.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Education
- Deaf Studies
Background:
- Investigating the impact of adult mediation on language acquisition in deaf children.
- Focusing on semantic and syntactic feature development through text retelling.
Observation:
- A deaf second grader's language needs were identified via story retellings.
- Intervention involved targeted adult-mediated conversations and untargeted tracking of language features.
Findings:
- Student performance on targeted semantic and syntactic features improved with adult facilitation.
- Positive linguistic changes were documented during unmediated retellings, indicating internalization.
- Untargeted language behaviors remained unchanged, supporting the role of mediation over maturation.
- The child demonstrated one academic year's reading growth on standardized tests.
Implications:
- Adult mediation is crucial for developing specific language skills in deaf learners.
- Text retelling is an effective method for assessing and facilitating language acquisition.
- Further group studies are recommended to generalize these findings.