Narrative competencies in deaf children. A study in relation to language education typology

The aim of the present study is to assess the narrative competencies of two groups of deaf children aged 6 to 14 years, attending two schools with radically different models of language education. One school embodies a clearly defined and strong pattern of bilingual education: Italian and Italian Sign Language (LIS) are taught to both hearing and deaf pupils, with more specialized classes of LIS for the deaf; the other school follows an ordinary Italian curriculum for hearing and deaf pupils, providing support in LIS for the deaf thanks to an educator, expert in LIS, present in the classroom. The two groups (of 15 participants each) were matched by non verbal IQ score, sociocultural background and chronological age range; their narrative competencies were assessed through a well-known narrative task, the Frog Story (Mayer 1969), and measured by a score ranging from 0 to 5 points. Results show that the deaf children attending the bilingual school produce significantly richer narratives than their mates attending the ordinary school, and their productions contain a higher number of complex iconic structures, as defined by Cuxac (2000), which can be considered as a distinctive feature of expertise in sign languages users. A further comparison with 30 hearing participants, also matched by non verbal IQ, sociocultural background and age range, again shows higher scores in the pupils of the bilingual school although differences are not statistically significant.