Education in Africa 
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| Title: | Examining classroom discourse in an oral programme at a special school for deaf students in Zimbabwe |
| Author: | Chimedza, Robert |
| Year: | 1999 |
| Periodical: | Zimbabwe Journal of Educational Research (ISSN 1013-3445) |
| Volume: | 11 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Period: | November |
| Pages: | 183-201 |
| Language: | English |
| Notes: | biblio. refs. |
| Geographic terms: | Zimbabwe Southern Africa |
| Subjects: | special education physically disabled education Language barrier Deafness Communication barriers |
| Abstract: | For many years education for the deaf in Zimbabwe has been modelled along the oral approach. Oral methods emphasize the use of audition and speech reading. Deaf students who use this approach need to learn to use their residual hearing as much as possible and combine this with speech reading. This study examines the sentence patterns that teachers and their deaf students use in an oral programme so as to establish the amount and type of communication that takes place and whether the sentence patterns used in oral utterances are conducive to optimal learning. Research participants were nine deaf students and their teacher at a special school for deaf students in Zimbabwe. The findings of the study showed that the teacher spoke almost three times more than the total contributions by all students. There is not much difference between this situation and discourses in the typical general education classroom. Teachers of deaf students appear to rely just as heavily as do general education teachers on lecture-discussion methods and are just as controlling of classroom communication. The deaf students' linguistic ages were far below their chronological ages. Fostering the development of age-appropriate language skills is one of the main missions that teachers of deaf students need to accomplish. In this context, denying deaf students conversations with peers in the classroom compounds the problem. Bibliogr., sum. |