R. Mander et al., PERSONAL COMPUTERS AND PROCESS WRITING - A WRITTEN LANGUAGE INTERVENTION FOR DEAF-CHILDREN, British journal of educational psychology, 65, 1995, pp. 441-453
This study was concerned with the effectiveness of word processing as
a written language intervention for primary-age deaf children. Subject
s were 14 children in two primary school deaf-unit classes matched in
terms of age, gender, and degree of hearing loss. A quasi-experimental
design incorporating multiple-group baselines with pre- and post-test
s enabled all subjects to receive the intervention while maintaining e
xperimental control. Samples of children's written language were colle
cted at the end of each phase in the study. Experienced teachers of de
af children rated five dimensions of the quality of the written langua
ge samples, while a speech and language therapist judged other linguis
tic qualities of the writing. Significant improvements in quality rati
ngs over the course of the study indicated that the word processing in
tervention had led to improvements in the children's written language
skills. These results confirm the effectiveness of word processing as
an adjunct to the process writing approach to written language instruc
tion for deaf children.