Improving Memory Skills in Deaf Young People
Presented on Tuesday 26 January 2010 by Angela Cordingley
Improving children's writing
Where to start?
Hearing children only come to written text and writing for themselves when they have some mastery of language, either oral or sign or both. They have acquired many aspects of grammar.
What about our children?
Deaf children have a reduced vocabulary and often less structure. So what can we do to facilitate their writing development?
Immersion
Immersion in language, talking to them and expecting them to watch and listen is very valuable. Many deaf children will acquire language in this way and require little additional support.
Many deaf children with direct teaching can extract language rules, which enables them to construct their own writing. However some children find this difficult. However Hudson (2005) suggested that immersion in language is not enough to develop an understanding of the structure of language. He suggested that children need direct and explicit teaching in the same way that foreign language teaching teaches grammar.
But to work this teaching of grammar has to be tailored to the language level of the child if it is to be effective. Many of the children who come into our secondary department have not developed a good enough understanding of grammar to allow them to construct grammatically correct sentences.
We decided to focus on improving their written structures.
We looked at their WRIT profiles and discovered that many children had high visual profiles, hence were likely to be more visual learners. Hence we decided to try a new approach to support their writing, using visual hooks to help them to 'fix' the structure.
Shape Coding
Susan Ebbels has shown that the use of shape coding is effective with Speech and Language Impaired Children.
So I went to the school in Surrey to see it in action. It had potential ... but the shapes were too complex.
Speech and Language Impaired children have language (but it is disordered). Our deaf children often have more limited vocabulary and the language may be disordered.
Where to start?
Research has shown that for deaf children short sentences improve the development of grammar.
S V O means 'who, verb, what'
So we decided to go back to basicsand try to build up children's structure from the language level of the child. We started with the type of sentences the children were producing.
eg;
| boy | went | park |
| s | v | o |
We decided that we would colour and shape code the main parts of a sentence to help the children 'see' the structure. This would aid their memory.
So they could write:
| boy | went | park |
| s | v | o |
not :
| the park | boy | went |
| o | s | v |
The initial shapes and colours.
Using Shape Coding
The shapes visually show the word order for simple sentences
eg;
This was really useful because now we had a language to talk about language.
Who / What?
Play with sentences
Where?
Play with the sentence
Developments
In school, we made our texts simpler to fit these shapes, so it would support their memory.
The children identified the shapes within the texts during group and individual activities and became keen to identify errors in given sentences (even those taken from their own work!)
Medieval England Text
William Duke of Normandy.
He came from Normandy.
He had an army.
His army were Normans.
Harold Hardrada was the King of Norway.
He was a powerful king.
He had an army.
His army were Vikings.
It was the 25th September 1066.
The Normans were shocked to see Harold's
army.
The two men fought a battle.
Harald Hardrada was killed.
An arrow hit his throat.
Harold Godwinson won the
battle.
Verbs
One of the biggest difficulties for the children were verbs. We coloured them red because they are dangerous!
Children need encouraging to think about when the event happened
yesterday, today, tomorrow
What doing? - Verb
| yesterday | today | tomorrow |
| past | present | future |
| I ate | I eat | I will eat |
| They jumped | They jump | They will jump |
We introduced the idea of 'sensible' and 'silly' verbs
eg; jumped jump - sensible
ate eat - silly
When we showed examples we tried to put the past tense on the left, so we could show it was in the past
To be
The verb 'to be' has always caused deaf children problems
I jumped vs I was jumping
We taught 'to be' discretely first and wrote texts with lots of examples
in.
W
e played matching games, ordering games etc.
Verb agreement
Verb books
We developed verb sheets with the children for a visual reference.
This area has proved useful not just with our special needs deaf children but our GCSE cohort use it as a tool to self correct their work.
The big question: Does it work?
W 2007
W 08
Our objectives for the day:
Do you feel:
- you have more knowledge about what deaf children can remember;
- you are able to plan more effectively from a deaf child's perspective;
- you can support writing - the permanent record of experiences;
- inspired!