Assessment of narrative writing by Persian-speaking students with hearing impairments

Abstract

Objective

Previous studies have highlighted that narrative skill is critical to the development of the literacy skills by children. Children with cochlear implants (CI) and hearing-aids (HA) may have problems in narrative development compared to peers with healthy hearing (HH). There is no exact data about the narrative writing ability of Persian-speaking students who are hearing-impaired. The current study was undertaken to compare the microstructure and macrostructure scores for narrative writing of Persian-speaking students who are hearing-impaired and peers with HH.

Design

This was a cross-sectional descriptive-analytical study.

Setting

The subjects were recruited from elementary schools in the city of Tehran.

Participants

A total of 144 elementary school students were participated.

Outcome measures

The written narratives were elicited using a wordless pictorial storybook story. Three-way ANOVA with post hoc adjusted Bonferroni test were applied to determine the main effects and interactions of grounded variables on the microstructure and macrostructure components of narrative writing.

Results

No significant differences were observed in the macrostructure components of narrative writing between hearing-impaired and HH students. Factors analysis showed that the 4^th grade HH students had significantly the highest scores, and the 3^rd grade HA students had significantly the lowest scores in microstructure components of narrative writing.

Conclusion

The findings revealed that hearing-impaired students similarly to their HH peers can transmit the main idea (macrostructure) of narrative writing, but show critical difficulties when using complete grammatical elements (microstructures) to form sentences in order to convey the idea in the narrative.

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