Reading Competence in Students with Cochlear Implants: An Analysis of their strategies

Abstract

The aim of the present work was twofold: to determine the reading levels reached by deaf students who use cochlear implants (CIs), and to evaluate whether the use of them determines their reading strategies. Participating in the study were 96 deaf students and 797 hearing students between the ages of 6 and 16 from different cities throughout Spain. The group of deaf students was divided into two: early implant (n=44), which included those who had received an implant before 30 months of age, and late implant (n=52). The PEALE battery (Analytical Assessment Tests of the Written Language) was used as assessment instrument. The results show that the reading levels reached by the group with early implants do not differ significantly from those obtained by hearing students of the same age. However, when analyzing reading strategies, all deaf students make use of the key word strategy (KWS), which consists in identifying the content words and, from them, deducing the meaning of the sentence without processing the function words. The use of the KWS may be due to the difficulties they have with the handling of function words. The need to introduce explicit teaching of morphology and syntax skills in the curriculum of deaf students is discussed.