Narrative skills of deaf and hearing students in bilingual contexts in Spain and Italy

Abstract

The main objective of the study is to investigate the narrative competences of deaf and hearing students enrolled in bilingual contexts in Spain and Italy. For this, a descriptive methodological approach has been adopted in which the simple was obtained incidentally based on the criteria of the bilingual model and teaching approach. Regarding the data collection procedure, students were asked to write a text, after viewing a sequence of images "Frog, where are you?". Subsequently, the written texts were analyzed following an elaborated model integrating the contributions of various authors. Results show that deaf and hearing students from the Italian context, compared to the Spanish context, write texts with a greater length and syntactic complexity and use evaluation devices more frequently. In addition, there are no significant differences between deaf and hearing students from the Italian context, regarding the use of subordinate propositions and evaluation devices relative to internal-mental states. Thus, the development of narrative skills in hearing and deaf students can be attributed to the didactic proposals implemented in the Italian school context and characterized by the pragmatic and communicative approach to writing.