Assessment of narrative writing by Persian-speaking students with hearing impairments

Objective: Previous studies have highlighted that narrative skill is critical to the development of the literacy skills by children. Children with cochlear implants (CI) and hearing aids (HA) may have problems in narrative development compared to peers with healthy hearing (HH). There is no exact data about the narrative writing ability of Persian-speaking students who are hearing-impaired. This study was undertaken to compare the microstructure and macrostructure scores for narrative writing of Persian-speaking students who are hearing-impaired and peers with HH.

Design: This was a cross-sectional descriptive-analytical study.

Setting: The subjects were recruited from elementary schools in the city of Tehran.

Participants: A total of 144 elementary school students were participated.

Outcome measures: The written narratives were elicited using a wordless pictorial storybook story. Three-way ANOVA with post hoc adjusted Bonferroni test was applied to determine the main effects and interactions of grounded variables on the microstructure and macrostructure components of narrative writing.

Results: No significant differences were observed in the macrostructure components of narrative writing between hearing-impaired and HH students. Factors analysis showed that the 4th grade HH students had significantly the highest scores, and the 3rd grade HA students had significantly the lowest scores in microstructure components of narrative writing.

Conclusion: The findings revealed that hearing-impaired students similarly to their HH peers can transmit the main idea (macrostructure) of narrative writing, but show critical difficulties when using complete grammatical elements (microstructures) to form sentences to convey the idea in the narrative.