Visual Input Enhancement via Essay Coding Results in Deaf Learners' Long-Term Retention of Improved English Grammatical Knowledge

Abstract

This study explored the efficacy of visual input enhancement, specifically essay enhancement, for facilitating deaf college students' improvement in English grammatical knowledge. Results documented students' significant improvement immediately after a 10-week instructional intervention, a replication of recent research. Additionally, the results of delayed assessment documented students' significant retention of that improvement five and a half months beyond the instructional intervention period. Essay enhancement served to highlight, via a coding procedure, students' successful and unsuccessful production of discourse-required target grammatical structures. The procedure converted students' written communicative output into enhanced input for inducing noticing of grammatical form and, through essay revision, establishing form-meaning connections leading to acquisition. With its optimal design characteristics supported by theoretical and empirical research, essay enhancement is a highly effective methodology that can be easily implemented as primary or supplementary English instruction for deaf students. The results of this study hold great promise for facilitating deaf students' English language and literacy development and have broad implications for second-language research, teaching, and learning.

Pronunciation Training Facilitates the Learning and Retention of L2 Grammatical Structures

“…It also stands out that participants engaged with the phonologically enhanced input by listening to each of the target verbs during both the training and testing. In this manner, the findings highlight that the advantage of pronunciation training like the type used in the present study, and IE more generally, may hinge in part precisely on the ways in which learners interact with the enhanced form (see also Berent, Kelly, Schmitz, & Kenney, 2009;Nguyen, Pham, & Pham, 2012;Rott, 2007). This connection between learners' level of engagement with IE and its potential impact on learning was already suggested by Sharwood Smith (1991) in his seminal work on IE: "What is desired is not so much noticing the signal as acting on it, that is, learning something from it" (p. 121).…”

The design of a software to enhance the reading comprehension skills of deaf students: An integration of multiple theoretical perspectives

“…There is a strong argument in favour of visual resources and visual language input in the education of the deaf, given the important role of visual communication for deaf children (Berent et al 2008;Easterbrooks and Baker 2002;Luckner et al 2001). However, although the role of visual communication can be promising, Marschark (2005) points out that there is a need to pay attention to the way visual resources are presented so that deaf students do not divide their attention between these visual sources, but rather deal with them effectively in order to enhance their learning.…”

The role of teachers in the academic English literacy acquisition experiences of deaf college students.

“…Cognitive, perceptual, and acquisitional factors constrain deaf learners' acquisition of spoken language knowledge, typically resulting in language delays and considerable struggle to attain sufficiently high English skill levels for educational and career success (Berent, Kelly, Schmitz, & Kenney, 2009;Paul, 2000). This challenge and its consequences are apparent in the comparison of deaf learners' assessed English proficiency levels relative to the English proficiency of their hearing peers (Karchmer & Mitchell, 2003).…”