Abstract
This study investigated teachers’ perception on the use of communication strategies in teaching students with hearing impairment in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. The study adopted descriptive survey design using a population of 84 teachers and a sample size of 70 teachers. Four research questions and four hypotheses guided the study. The instrument for data collection was Communication Strategies Questionnaire. Data collected were analyzed using mean, standard deviation and independent t-test. Findings of the study showed that there was no significant difference in male and female teachers’ perception on the use of communication strategies, no significant difference in teachers’ perception on the use of oral, manual and total communication strategy in teaching children with hearing impairment. Recommendations were made among which are Capacity building of in-service classroom teachers through workshop and seminars to acquaint them with the skills of using this technique in teaching in schools. Sign language dictionaries with academic related words should be developed for use in the classroom to support classroom teachers during instruction.
INTRODUCTION The ability to recognize and repair breakdowns in communication is an important aspect of conversational skill. Research has shown that young normally hearing children are able to recognize and repair communication break-downs, and that their repair strategies become more sophisticated during the school years (Brinton and Fujiki, 1989; McTear and Conti-Ramsden, 1992). Much less is known about the development of these skills in hearing-impaired children (Ciocci and Baran, 1998). The present paper examines the available literature and suggests an approach for researching and developing the strategies of hearing-impaired children for managing communication breakdowns
STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWNS Successful communication is an interactive process, dependent on the behaviour of both ‘speaker’ and ‘listener’. Grice (1975) proposed a set of maxims that underlie effective speaker and listener skills. He argued that effectivespeakers are informative (Maxim of Quantity), truthful and sincere (Maxim of Quality), relevant (Maxim of Relation), and clear (Maxim of Manner). In turn, listeners assume that speakers are following these maxims and use this knowledge when they interpret utterances. Of course, another aspect of conversational skill is knowing when to ‘violate’ these maxims (for example, the use of ironic humour). Grice (1975) referred to these violations as ‘conversational implicature’. In everyday conversations, communication breakdowns occur for many reasons attributable to external and internal factors. External factors include background noise or interruptions from people not involved in the conversation. Internal factors relate to the conversationalists themselves.Communication might breakdown because speakers provide insufficient information, speak unintelligibly, wrongly assume common ground between themselves and their partner, or speak about a different topic without signalling a change of topic. These all occur frequently and can be seen as violations of Grice’s (1975) maxims. Listeners, on the other hand, might be inattentive, lack the desire to participate in the conversation, or have auditory or comprehension problems that make it difficult for them to interpret a speaker’s utterance (Beattie and Kysela, 1992). There are two main types of repair mechanisms, categorized according to who initiates the repair and who provides clarification: self-repair and other-initiated repair (Brinton and Fujiki, 1989). Self-repair occurs within the production of a single speaker who, on realizing that the utterance is unclear,reformulates it:C: ‘Cause John gave …‘cause Grandma gave it to me’Other-initiated repairs occur when the listener initiates repair and the speaker provides clarification. The latter form the main focus of this paper. Listeners can use several types of clarification request to signal communication breakdown and initiate repair. Non-specific requests for repetition(such as ‘Huh?’, ‘What?’ and ‘Pardon?’) convey that a communication break-down has occurred but do not indicate why the utterance was misunderstood