Comprensión lectora de personas sordas adultasconstrucción y validación de un programa de instrucción

Abstract

The goal of the thesis is to study the consequences of applying information technologies to the instructional process of reading comprehension in profoundly and prelingually deaf adult people with different linguistic modalities (oral or sign language). The first section analyzes reading processes, and then the specific characteristics of these processes in deaf people are described. Later, the most common methods and systems applied in our context to improve reading comprehension are presented. Following our interest in computer assisted instruction a chapter has been added on the use of information technologies in learning processes, including a revision of existing software for the training of reading. The second section presents an instructional model based on information technology to improve reading comprehension in deaf adults which includes a software tool named SIMICOLE. This software consists of: a) 57 texts about ten different topics with some features addressed to facilitate reading: title, image, introduction and vocabulary support in written and Spanish Sign Language; b) a set of drill and practice exercises for each text to do after the reading and which are automatically evaluated by the computer; c) two production exercises for each text with a summary and an inference question, whose results sent through Internet to a tutor; d) a database system which is available to the tutor for consulting information permanently updated about learners results and learner-program interaction. The instructional system works in four areas which are especially difficult for deaf people in reading comprehension: lack of oral language knowledge, scarce encyclopaedic knowledge, absence of knowledge on the structure of the texts and weak knowledge of strategies to reduce the semantic information. Finally, results of an experimental application in a group of seven deaf people are presented. The comparison between pre and post test scores shows better performance for all the learners. Although improvement level is different according to previous characteristics: better results are obtained in learners with better previous oral language domain as already expected. Some conclusions about new features and components to add to the training program are also presented at the end. These include explicit teaching of strategies for selection and reduction of the information contained in the texts, as well as suggestions of changes in the computer system SIMICOLE that may contribute to an increase in the learners self-regulation of the learning process.