Assessment of reading skills of normally hearing and hearing impaired students with informal reading inventory

Reading skills are very important in academic and social development of students. Development of educational programmes depends on the analysis of strengths and weaknesses in students' reading abilities. Therefore systematic assessment of reading skills and strategies is required. It is important to use informal reading inventories in these evaluations.The purpose of this study is to assess reading skills of normal hearing and hearing impaired students with cochlear implants by using informal reading inventory. The research methodologies are causal comparative and correlation research. 48 students; attending 3-8 grades in primary education, participated to the study. 24 of this group were hearing impaired and remaining 24 were with normal hearing. Students with coclear implant in this research are studying in İÇEM (Education and Research Center for Hearing Impaired Children) where Natural Auditory/Oral Approach is applied. An Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) was developed to use in evaluating reading skills of the study group. The IRI consists of narratives and expository texts for students between prechool and 8th grade. The validity and reliability were established both for the texts and IRI.Students' retelling, answering questions and close procedure skills in narratives and retelling and answering questions in expository texts were examined. Students' use of language cueing systems which consist of syntax, semantics, pragmatics and graphophanics was evaluated by using reading miscues.Independent samples t-test was used to compare reading levels of the normal hearing and hearing impaired students. Regression analysis was used to estimate the predictors of reading levels of the students who use cochlear implants. Miscue analysis was used to assess language cueing systems.The results of this study indicate that cochlear implanted students have acquired retelling and answering questions skills in narratives and expository texts and also cloze procedures skills in narratives. Of these students 54% have acquired scores comparable to normally hearing students for retelling of narratives, but their comprehension level is behind their hearing peers. Variables which explain reading levels of the students who use cochlear implants are IQ, age at implemantation, age at starting at İÇEM and cochlear implant age. Although the findings of miscue analysis indicated that implanted students had more reading miscues than the normally hearing ones, the type of the reading miscues are same in both groups. Also implanted students could comprehend the texts by using syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and graphophonics.Depending on the results, it was argued that apart from IQ, development of the reading skills of the hearing impaired children related to age at implemantation, age at implantation, and intense Auditory/Oral education starting from an early age. Evaluation of language skills and reading levels are important in estimating the benefits of the educational settings and educational placement. Because the hearing loss sample of this study ?namely, İÇEM students- has severely different audiological and educational characteristics than the others in the country, the findings could not be generalized to those implanted children besides İÇEM.