Advanced learning technology for a bilingual education of deaf children

Italian deaf children in elementary and middle school have limited competence in written Italian, which is in part caused by difficulties with lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of the Italian language. This study describes a recently developed interactive multimedia application designed to facilitate deaf children's access to new information and reports the results of an initial experiment conducted with deaf elementary and middle school children. Subjects were twelve deaf children with varying backgrounds and linguistic competencies, ranging in age from 6;6 to 16;1 years. Experimentation was structured in three phases. In the initial phase, children explored the computer environment freely, and in the two subsequent phases, children were presented with activities requiring use of the application to obtain information. Results of a final evaluation indicated that all children were able to use and profit from the application. Findings are discussed in terms of bilingual methods of education for deaf children and their implications for increasing deaf children's competence in written language.