Writing Differences and Errors Among Hearing Impaired Students

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Even though it is noted that hearing impaired students develop parallel to normally hearing students, hearing impaired students still differ or make errors in various aspects of writing (Mayer). Each of my sources claims some of the same or different weaknesses or errors in hearing impaired people’s writing; therefore, each source will be noted for its specific perspective on the subject. For example, it was reported that hearing impaired students typically lack severely in the development of their syntactical skills; more specifically, they “use fewer cohesive markers or fewer different lexical devices to signal cohesion” (Marschark and Spencer; Antia, Reed, and Kreimeyer). It was also discovered that a hearing impaired student’s writing tends to consistently show an introduction of ideas, but failure to fully develop or establish said ideas due to a lack of semantic and syntactic skills (Yoshinaga-Itano, Snyder, and Mayberry).

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Not only is the comprehension of a hearing impaired person’s writing affected, but the production of the writing itself is not strong. Marschark and Spencer and Antia, Reed, and Kreimeyer agree that hearing impaired people tend to not have a broad vocabulary or to use extensive word variety. Also, compared to their hearing counterparts, hearing impaired individuals are not able to produce complex sentences or have ample sentence length. Researchers have noted that hearing impaired students “made errors of addition (adding unnecessary words), omissions (omitting necessary words), substitutions . . ., and word-order deviations (inappropriate word order)” (Paul). The attention brought to these errors was significant, but there was no conversation about the significance of the errors themselves.

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Overall, it can be summarized that hearing impaired students struggle with the mechanical and organizational skills of writing (Paul). All of these discoveries and statements made about hearing impaired students must be taken with caution because not every source’s information is entirely accurate for every situation. There are a wide range of variables that affect something as broad as writing and they cannot all always be taken into consideration. However, it is safe to assume that hearing impairment leads to differences in both writing development and writing itself.