Abstract:

The implementation of inclusive education in Russian universities faces a number of challenges, including administrative and methodological issues. One of the major teaching problems is monitoring students’ communicative competencies, particularly, monitoring their writing. It is important to assess writing skills of hearing impaired students correctly, as their learning, cognitive skills and communicative competencies, including writing skills (delivering a coherent message), are directly related to the length of time and causes of their disability, rehabilitation, psychological well-being, and the degree of involvement of families and school staff in the rehabilitation process. The distinctive focus of our research is that the writing skills assessment is carried out on paper and digital platforms.

We have studied different ways of education quality monitoring of hearing impaired students and come to understand the problem of establishing criteria for their writing skills assessment. In students without disabilities, consistency (which is expressed in the sequence and structure of discourse), a variety of lexical and syntactic features (which is expressed in the use of synonyms, antonyms, rhetorical constructions, metaphors, comparisons), grammar correctness, informativeness (plot availability), emotionality are successfully used as criteria for monitoring writing skills, while, in hearing impaired students, almost all quantitative and qualitative criteria have to be seriously revised.

The paper compares certain criteria for monitoring writing skills among students with and without hearing impairment and determines some corrected criteria for hearing impaired students. Experimental results show that the main monitoring criterion for hearing impaired students is emotionality (expressiveness), but it is supplemented by a number of others that have little or no significance for students without disabilities, for example, the visual perception of sentence position in the text, the appearance of semantic pauses connected with shifting a part of the sentence to a new line. Our criteria will improve the methodology of humanitarian disciplines for teaching students with disabilities at universities.

Keywords:

Hearing impaired students, education quality monitoring, writing skills, inclusion experience for students without disabilities.