Use of syntactic and/or semantic strategies for the reading comprehension of adolescent students with deafness

Background and objective: Traditionally, it has been described that the vast majority of deaf students do not use or misuse the grammatical aspects of the sentence and, therefore, they have a partial understanding of its meaning. In recent years, given the improvements in both hearing aids and early detection and intervention, numerous studies have highlighted substantial improvements in reading comprehension results achieved by deaf students. This study examines whether reading comprehension strategies in students with hearing loss have changed in the light of scientific and educational developments in recent decades. Participants, materials and method: The reading comprehension strategies used by both a group of students with hearing loss (N = 29) and a group of hearing students (N = 359) were evaluated. All of these students are in the sixth grade of primary and the second and fourth grades of compulsory secondary education (CSE). The task used was an adaptation to Catalan of the Keyword Strategy Screening Test of the PEALE Battery (Domínguez et al., 2013). Results: The results showed that deaf students had a lower mastery of syntax, resulting in significantly lower levels of reading comprehension compared to the control group. Conclusions: The study emphasizes, on one hand, the importance of working on morphosyntactic aspects to improve the reading comprehension of students with deafness. On the other hand, there is a need to identify the specific difficulties that the student presents in order to adjust our intervention as much as possible.