The orthographic mistakes for non-hearing children with cochlear implants-Case study-

Abstract

This study aims at finding out the orthographic mistakes made by children with cochlear implants through an analysis of their writings, and at diagnosing the difficulties they face when transforming the spoken into written. The study was conducted on 03 primary education learners with cochlear implants aged between 10 and 11, who were chosen at random. In addition, the study uses the analytical descriptive method, the case study, and the scale designed by Hachani Souad (2016) to measure the orthographic mistakes and classify them into lexical and phonological. Findings show that children with cochlear implants suffer clear difficulties in orthography, mainly substitution and distortion of consonants, reflecting troubles in representing the phonological structure of words and matching sounds with letters.  Besides, children with cochlear implants suffer difficulties in the auditory (phonological) recognition and a lexical poverty. These two dimensions are integral and directly affect the quality of writing. Therefore, the study recommends adopting an early comprehensive educational approach that targets the linguistic and auditory skills, and fostering the individual interventions according to the specificity of each child to achieve linguistic efficiency after cochlear implant. These results do not only help diagnose the deficits; rather, they shed light on the urgent need to develop specialized and adapted teaching programs based on an exact understanding of these children, which include therapeutical and preventive educational activities that strengthen the vocal representations and distinction between consonants and vowels, and train children on identifying the points of articulations inside each  word (start, middle, end), with focus on the recurrent orthographic patterns that cause common mistakes.

Keywords

orthography; orthographic mistakes; hearing impairment; cochlear implant.