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The impact of school culture on the academic progress of deaf learners in Tanzanian inclusive schools
Abstract
The learning situation of deaf students in inclusive secondary
education in Tanzania has witnessed a decade of struggle and choice on the best inclusion modality. This has resulted in an inconsistency in the accommodation of deaf students in inclusive schools. In this respect, this study was conducted to explore how the culture of a school has contributed to the academic progress of deaf students in the first decade of inclusive education. The study, therefore, employed phenomenology methods in collecting and analysing the data. The findings show that schools have not been able to change their cultures to accommodate deaf students. Hence, the learning of most students in secondary education takes place in a regular culture of the school.
As a result, most of them have not only failed to reach the next levels of their education cycle but also dropped out of school. Therefore, we recommend that for the building of an equitable learning space for deaf students in an inclusive school, the curriculum should be adapted to the bimodal-bicultural model.
... As well, a few of those who move to secondary education manage to complete and get a good score at that level [15]. This is proved by Mkama and Storbeck [16] whose study revealed that, 54% of 86 secondary school deaf students in Tanzania involved in the study dropped out of school and 82% of those students who reached form four failed in their final examination. Likewise, another study by Mkama [17] on literacy skills among form two deaf students in 24 secondary schools found that all 428 studied students had some varying literacy challenges. ...
Comprehension among deaf pupils in Tanzania has been a persisting problem for decades. Interesting enough, deaf pupils in the country have been attending primary education for ten years whereby chaining strategy has been a common strategy for teaching them reading skills. Despite the use of chaining strategy which is being promoted by different scholars in the world as a strongest strategy in promoting reading skill, still, deaf graduate with poor reading ability. Thus, the current study intended to find out the usefulness of chaining strategy in developing language comprehension among deaf pupils in Tanzania. The study was conducted in four special primary schools for deaf from Dare es Salaam, Njombe, Kagera and Tabora and was guided by the theory of simple view of reading and (VARK) model. It employed mixed research approach with a convergent research design. In-depth interview and a five Likert scale questionnaire were used to collect data from 20 teachers, while test as well as observation were employed in collecting data from 162 deaf pupils. Data were analyzed through descriptive, simple linear regression and content analysis. It was revealed that chaining strategy had significant contribution in developing deaf pupils’ ability of generating meaning from individual words (p = .000) and short sentences (p = .002). On the other side, chaining strategy had insignificant influence in developing deaf pupils’ ability of generating meaning from long sentences (p = .672) and reading texts without challenges (p = .089). The conclusion drawn from the findings was that, chaining strategy does not guarantee the development of language comprehension among deaf pupils, unless extra innovations are done. It was recommended that, deaf need to be identified and exposed to sign language in early ages, also early grade teachers need to be competent in sign language.
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