Nominal groups in deaf and hearing students’ narratives: A functional perspective

Abstract

Understanding the language aspect of deaf students in reference to their hearing counterparts plays a salient role in providing language teaching and learning treatment for the former. As the initial effort to contribute to the language pedagogy for individuals with deafness, this study reveals the patterns of nominal groups in the Indonesian narratives of four deaf senior high school students and four hearing students of the same level. A qualitative text analysis was adopted as the research design to investigate the nominal group patterns in both data sets. Eight narratives about “being chased by a dog” were first identified in terms of their schematic structure. Then the ‘things’ or ‘participants’ in the stories were analysed based on the experiential nominal group framework of Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), consisting of Deictic, Numerative, Epithet, Classifier, Thing, and Qualifier. The analysis of nominal group patterns shows that ‘participants’ in the four stories of deaf writers were most frequently represented with Thing only (76.9%), Thing + Deictic (17.9%), Thing + Qualifier (3.8%), and Thing + Epithet (1.3%). In the compositions of their hearing peers, five other patterns were also employed, including those with three constituents like Thing + Deictic + Qualifier. The findings of this study hint at the simplified nature of deaf students’ nominal groups. In narratives, complex nominal group patterns contribute to representing things specifically. It is expected that further treatment can be provided to assist deaf students in making meaning of their narratives functionally, for example, by using complex nominal group patterns.

Prepositional Phrases in Deaf and Hearing Students’ Narratives: A Functional Perspective

“…A recent study carried out by Juliarta (2021) on the prepositional phrases of a novel also has indicated that two of the most common patterns in the novel refer to Preposition + Thing and Preposition + Deictic + Thing. The finding reported by the functional analysis of Manar (2022) has also shown that both deaf and hearing students tended to employ Thing only or Thing + Deictic in the nominal groups of their stories. Although nominal groups are different from prepositional phrases, the latter contains the former.…”

“…Despite their 'special' nature in language, deaf students are often expected to meet the expectation of their environment especially to write in the 'same' way as their hearing peers (Nodoushan, 2008;Spencer et al, 2003). The fact is that their written language has been characterized by unique linguistic features (Andrade et al, 2010;Favero et al, 2007;Lintangsari et al, 2019;Manar, 2022;Strong & Prinz, 1997;Wolbers et al, 2014), as the result of their limited verbal-linguistic input acquired from the environment. The linguistic challenges faced by students with deafness, for example, are reflected in the forms of grammatical features they adopt for making meaning.…”

“…To date, writings for deaf students have been studied not in isolation but rather based on various genres with their distinct purposes (see Kilpatrick & Wolbers, 2020;Manar, 2022;Strassman et al, 2019;Wolbers et al, 2022). The study of Kilpatrick & Wolbers (2020) analyzed deaf students' writings of recount and report while that of Wolbers et al (2022) evaluated recount, report, and persuasive genres.…”

“…The study of Kilpatrick & Wolbers (2020) analyzed deaf students' writings of recount and report while that of Wolbers et al (2022) evaluated recount, report, and persuasive genres. Further, whereas the analysis of Strassman et al (2019) was on deaf students' writings in relation to academic language, that of Manar (2022) was related to the narrative genre.…”

“…One of the genres that has become a prominent medium for investigating the linguistic features of individuals with deafness has been associated with narratives (see Bowers et al, 2018;Lintangsari et al, 2019;Manar, 2022;Terugi & Gutierrez-Caceres, 2015;. This phenomenon might be due to the nature of narratives characterized by the demand to pose problematic events followed by resolution.…”