Series | Lingue dei segni e sordità
Volume 6 | Monograph | Alfabeto manuale e abilità di lettura
Abstract
The volume aims to present and evaluate some intervention programmes in which the visuo-gestural modality has been used as a communication and a reading support, in different educational and developmental contexts. Sign language appears to be a valid instrument of inclusion not only for deaf people but also for hearing children, with communication disorders. This is the case of the study we conducted in a primary school class, in which we used sign language as an inclusive means of communication for a non-verbal autistic child. Furthermore, we discuss Sillabiamo, a reading method based on fingerspelling, the manual alphabet used in sign languages. We conducted five case studies in order to verify the effectiveness of this method and to improve its features. In three of them, Sillabiamo is used as a first approach to reading; we used it with two groups of pre-school children (3;4-6;2) and a case of Down’s Syndrome associated with verbal dyspraxia (10;2). In the other two case studies, Sillabiamo is used as a support to specific reading difficulties in a case of Cornelia de Lange’s Syndrome (7;9) and a case of suspected SLD. These studies reveal promising results of the use of Sillabiamo in the contexts we analyse. Sillabiamo gives participants useful information and tools towards the objective of decoding a written text or overcoming difficulties in fluency and accuracy in reading.
Keywords Fingerspelling • Dyslexia • Sign language • Literacy • Classroom inclusion • Reading difficulties • Manual alphabet
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-779-1 | e-ISBN 978-88-6969-779-1 | Published March 29, 2024 | Accepted Jan. 9, 2024 | Submitted June 15, 2023 | Language it
Copyright © 2024 Beatrice Giuliano. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.