1,721,018 research outputs found
Reading Comprehension and Deafness: the Impact of E-learning in an Italian EFL Context
No full textForeign language learning holds a number of challenges that vary according to a wide number of variables. Deaf learners face the additional challenge of not being able to fully rely on the acoustic channel as a source of linguistic input. This paper presents the results of a one-sample pretest/posttest study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of a deaf centred e-learning environment (DELE), compared to the traditional pen and paper approach, in three reading comprehension tasks. Eight Italian prelingually and profoundly deaf students were asked to complete a multiple choice, a cloze and a true/false task. A series of t-tests revealed an overall statistically significant decrease in the number of wrong answers and no answers provided, as well as a reduced average item response time, when using DELE. These results seem to suggest that a more visually oriented learning environment, specifically designed for deaf learners, may prove to be more effective than traditional paper-based materials
An E-Learning environment to Improve deaf people language acquisition
No full textPrelingual deaf learners experience difficulties in achieving receptive and expressive skills in verbal language. In this paper we aim to present some features of the Notional-functional approach presented through an e-learning environment created for the promotion of literacy skills in young deaf learners.
The Notional-functional approach embraces any strategy of language teaching that derives the content of learning from an initial analysis of the learner's need to express three different kinds of meaning: Functional (i.e. the social purpose of the utterance); Modal (the degree of likelihood); Conceptual - the meaning relations expressed by forms within the sentence (categories of communicative function).
The data which was collected from the subjects has been analyzed by using DELE, an open source e-learning environment implemented within the FIRB-VISEL project(1), funded by MIUR which, using an integrated editor, allows teachers to:
- define a learning path by inserting texts, images, videos, and animations to be automatically integrated into the environment structure;
- create an open source database by collecting materials produced by teachers working with deaf learners.
The results of the investigation have revealed that the functional approach to deaf language instruction is more effective in acquiring grammatical accuracy than the structural approach. The study concludes with pedagogical implications and recommendations for the application of the functional approach in deaf language learning
La lingua dei segni italiana
No full textThis manual aims to provide a systematic and up-to-date overview of Italian linguistics taking into account new research topics such as Italian outside of Italy, historical varieties, or the syntactic properties of early Italian. Particular focus will be placed on linguistic subfields that have grown more important and relevant in the past years and decades, such as pragmatics, textual linguistics, corpus linguistics, or language acquisition
Metalinguistic knowledge of second language acquisition terminology: A deaf signer perspective.
No full textWe present here the case of one deaf student who attended two Language Teaching courses, the first one compulsory and the second one elective, necessary to satisfy the requirements to complete his Master of Arts-Linguistics program. We investigated a very special aspect of meta- linguistic knowledge by asking our participant to sign and describe a list of the most widely used technical terms of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). These were: Acquisition and Learning, Com municative competence, Interlanguage and Fossilization, Interference errors, Content and Functional words, Morpheme and Phoneme. All these terms had been introduced during lectures and laboratory sessions. Although our participant attended them with the assistance of an interpreter we found that he did not possess an explicit knowledge of the above concepts. Some terms were quite electively signed due to an implicit awareness of their meaning, others were clearly resulting from literal trans-lation from Italian, but were not fully understood. In a few cases our participant gave the same sign for two terms or was not able to produce any sign. The results so is that enriching sign languages with metalinguistic terminology will help deaf students to really understand what they study and achieve better results in their academic endeavours
The Notional-functional approach to Improve deaf people language acquisition
No full textPrelingual deaf learners experience difficulties in achieving receptive and expressive skills in verbal language. In this paper we aim to present some features of the Notional-functional approach presented through an e-learning environment created for the promotion of literacy skills in young deaf learners.
The Notional-functional approach embraces any strategy of language teaching that derives the content of learning from an initial analysis of the learner’s need to express three different kinds of meaning: Functional (i.e. the social purpose of the utterance); Modal (the degree of likelihood); Conceptual – the meaning relations expressed by forms within the sentence (categories of communicative function).
The data which was collected from the subjects has been analyzed by using DELE, an open source e- learning environment implemented within the FIRB-VISEL project1, funded by MIUR which, using an integrated editor, allows teachers to:
- define a learning path by inserting texts, images, videos, and animations to be automatically integrated into the environment structure;
- create an open source database by collecting materials produced by teachers working with deaf learners.
The results of the investigation have revealed that the functional approach to deaf language instruction is more effective in acquiring grammatical accuracy than the structural approach. The study concludes with pedagogical implications and recommendations for the application of the functional approach in deaf language learning
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