Reading understanding on deaf professionals of a higher education institution

Abstract

Introduction: Reading is an important practice to communicate and to understand the world around us. Some researches indicate that deaf subjects have significant difficulties in reading comprehension. Objective: To assess reading comprehension in deaf professionals from a higher education institution. Method: Case study: 14 adult subjects, deaf, literate, both male and female, aged between 20.6 and 42.7 years. Procedure: PHASE 1: Application of Cloze Test on a journalistic text with approximately 200 words, 30 blanks. PHASE 2: According to the results obtained by the subjects in Cloze test, they were asked to perform a new linguistic task: reading followed by the preparation of a written summary of the original text. Six subjects accepted to participate in this phase. Criteria for results interpretation: the answers provided in Cloze test were ranked as: correct, possible, incorrect and no answer. A descriptive data analysis was held. The summarized texts were qualitatively analyzed. Results: Most of the subjects obtained scores significantly below compared to the maximum total score of the Cloze test. Of the 6 phase 2 participants, only one did not include essential information in the summary of the text. CONCLUSION: the performance in reading comprehension, in deaf subjects enrolled, is hampered by the formal (morphological and syntactic) aspects of the linguistic code and favored by semantic and pragmatic aspects used to elaborate written summaries.