What can Still be Learned?

7

Although there were several captivating studies on the writing development of hearing impaired people, I did not find any information on the consistency of grammar errors, writing styles, and other areas of writing over time. For instance, Yoshinaga-Itano, Snyder, and Mayberry’s study discussed the possibilities of how a person’s writing differs over age levels and by hearing loss, but these researchers and others have not considered anything related to how hearing impaired individuals may have consistent problems in writing that are related to their hearing impairment. This may be difficult to study because researchers would need to have many writing samples from participants and the study would have to consider the multiple variables that would affect the writing.

8

I decided that I am going to limit these difficulties by doing a study on myself. Considering I have had a hearing loss since I was in middle school, I decided my own writing samples would be the best to study. My overall theory for this personal study was that I would find a consistency in the areas that I have chosen related to hearing impairment over a period of time represented by the writing samples. For this analysis, I focused on punctuation errors, word repetitiveness, word choice, sentence structure, and development of ideas.