Narrative differences of children with normal hearing in general education and mainstreamed children with hearing loss of ages four, five and six years

Young children share their feelings, thoughts and experiences through narratives. Narrative development integrates the linguistic, cognitive and psycho-social skills of young children and impacts upon literacy skills and academic success. Children with hearing loss have delays in language development affecting their early narrative experiences. As young children with normal hearing develop, their linguistic skills expand as they listen to stories and participate in describing, creating and reading stories. The opportunities for developing skills through sharing experiences with stories facilitates language learning for children with hearing loss and the potential for inclusion with children who have normal hearing. Through experiences with play and relating stories, children with hearing impairment are provided with a naturalistic environment which will support development of narrative discourse and therefore of language. The emergence of storytelling through the child's pretend play provides an important foundation for narrative development.; As children participate in the construction of meaning from the construction of meaning from their linguistic environment, stories are created, exchanged, read, reread and enjoyed. When children have limited auditory access to listening to stories, development of their storytelling process and the ability to relate real-life and fictional stories may be affected. Through narratives children relate experiences integrating form and content in a temporally sequential manner while constructing meaning from their experiences.; The focus of my research is to explore the qualitative and quantitative differences in narrative development of children with normal hearing and children with hearing loss of ages four, five and six years of age. This research examines various contexts for eliciting narratives. Sequencing skills as a precursor to storytelling and literacy skills are examined. Story grammar components and the use of temporal sequential relationships, including past tense markers and temporal terms are investigated. Understanding this development will help teachers and clinicians provide a meaningful environment for promoting narrative development of children with hearing impairment.