Strategies for teaching written expression from a systemic approach in deaf university students at UNAN-Managua, Nicaragua

Abstract

The present research aims to highlight the importance of written expression from a systemic approach to stimulate the cognitive process in deaf university students. The application of teaching strategies is necessary for the improvement of writing processes in deaf students, since they, in addition to writing daily from their language, do not know the writing processes such as the phases of writing, textual properties, textual structure. They also have linguistic, grammatical, orthographic and writing problems. The methodology of this research is the interpretative paradigm, it tries to understand in a dynamic and divergent way the educational reality, submitted to the study, and to explain the most common ways of how deaf students learn. This study applies the qualitative approach, with descriptive and explicative research, specifying the learning processes and proposing accurate and pertinent solutions to the teaching of written expression in deaf university students. Three instruments were applied: interview to a speech therapist expert, director of the Pediatric Speech Therapy Center MINSA (Ministry of Health), diagnosis to three first year deaf students of the Faculties of Education and Languages, POLISAL and Engineering of the UNAN-Managua, and a didactic procedural sequence. The results show that the students find it difficult to write, they do not master the writing processes, they do not manage to write drafts, they lack an adequate use of textual properties, they do not know revision and self-correction mechanisms and they fail in grammatical and spelling studies. As a result, after the didactic intervention, linguistic awareness, taste and significant learning of the written expression process were improved.