Abstract:

Deaf children have enormous literacy difficulties. This is due to their hearing impairment which prevents them from being exposed to oral language, so that they are unable to acquire a verbal language through a natural process. As a consequence, they have difficulties in mastering single elements of a text like pronouns, articles and embedded clauses and they also show reading comprehension difficulties as they tend to remember disconnected portions of a single text rather than the whole text. This condition is also due to the type of educational intervention deaf children are normally faced with and which accustoms them to single words and isolated sentences rather than on entire texts, thus slowing down the development of the ability to reason on a text as a whole. It is so far clear, that deaf children face great barriers in access to education and that almost the totality of school books and textbooks is inadequate to their specific needs. Being our society strongly influenced by ICT and being all children deeply attracted by Internet technology, it seems pertinent to think about ICT-based applications for helping deaf children improve their literacy. These applications should be developed taking into account that deaf children are visual learners, being eyes their primary way of acquiring and learning language. Moreover, visual learners prefer to use images, pictures, colors and maps to organize information and to communicate with others as they can easily visualize objects, plans and outcomes in their mind’s eye. All these aspects considered, we proposed LODE (Logic-based web tool for DEaf children), a web tool based on stories and educational games, to improve children’s reading comprehension and reasoning ability [1]). In particular, LODE aims at stimulating deaf children reasoning on the temporal relations that occur among different events in a story. We deliberately chose to publish LODE on the web and not on a CD-ROM, so as to reach the largest audience possible. The tool offers a list of stories the child can choose between. Each story is enriched with explicit temporal relations that will become the core of the educational games linked to the stories. LODE is an ‘intelligent’ tool: an automated reasoner supports both LODE’s developers, in creating effective textual games, and children, giving them useful feedback when playing LODE’s games. A prototype of LODE has already been evaluated with hearing and deaf children. These tests highlighted some questions related to the behavior children adopt while playing the comprehension games, which are currently based on the ‘multiple choice’ paradigm. Indeed, what happens is that the children tend to choose casually the right answer to give, without really referring to the read story. In order to avoid this casual-answer-pattern, we are currently designing a new version of LODE with new games, not based on the multiple choices paradigm, and with dynamic components (i.e. images and/or parts of text). Dynamicity and scoring techniques should help capture the child’s attention and stimulate him/her reasoning before giving the answer. As future work, we are planning to check the pedagogical effectiveness of the last LODE’s version with Italian deaf and hearing children.
[1] Gennari, R., Mich, O. Constraint-based Temporal Reasoning for E-learning with LODE. In: Proc. of the 13th Int. Conf. on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (2007)

Keywords:

literacy and deaf children, games for learning.