Een meervoudige casusstudie - Divingduck.nl

The bilingual development of deaf children in SignLanguage of the Netherlands and DutchA multiple case studyThis thesis describes a longitudinal multiple case study on language proficiency,communicative behaviour and communication strategies in Sign Language of the Netherlands(SLN) and Dutch of eleven deaf children of Viataal from the age of three to seven years. At theend of the twentieth century SLN was implemented in the curriculum of the schools of Viataal.This has changed the educational en pedagogical situation of the deaf children of Viataal.The assumption is that through learning a sign language, a visual language and fordeaf children an accessible language, the process of language acquisition develops faster. Inusing a sign language deaf children have a better access to information and it is easier forthem to communicate with other children and adults. However, history teaches us that for along time sign language has not been considered to be an option for deaf children to learn anduse as a natural language. Only in the last two decades has sign language been introducedinto the Dutch school system for deaf children and were courses in SLN offered to parents ofdeaf children. Deaf children had now education in two languages, SLN and spoken Dutch.Research on bilingualism in hearing children teaches us that children are able to learnseveral languages at the same time if certain conditions are complied with (Appel & Vermeer,2000). The acquisition of two languages takes more time than acquiring one language. Theresearch on bilingualism is extensive both nationally and internationally. However there is notyet much knowledge on the combined acquisition of a sign language and a spoken languageby deaf children.The goal of this thesis was to gain insight in the bilingual language acquisition of deaf childrenand the influence of that combined acquisition on the communication development. Chapters 1and 2 describe the backgrounds of the study.Semi-spontaneous conversations between the deaf children and deaf and hearingadults form the essence of the data collection. From school year 1998-1999 up to 2000-2001conversations between the individual deaf children and hearing and deaf adults werevideotaped on a regular basis. The role that the children have in these conversations isanalysed on three aspects: lexical and syntactic complexity of the utterances, communicativeturns and the use of communicative strategies. Additionally language proficiency wasinvestigated by means of receptive and productive language tasks and background informationwas collected by interviewing parents and teachers. In chapter 3 the methodology andexecution of the study is described as well as profiles of the participating schools and children.In chapter 4 several aspects of the language development of the eleven deaf childrenin Dutch and SLN are described. Productive and receptive language tasks were administeredto investigate the language development in SLN and Dutch. The results on the languageproficiency tasks show that all the children display a positive development on receptive andproductive language skills. However there is a significant delay in their development in Dutch352