The role of sign language in enhancement of communicating skills and academic achievement of hearing impaired children

Controverse about the effects which the Sign Language of deaf has on their communicative and educational achievement is the subject of actual research. For the first time the effects of Serbian Sign Language are investigated. The sample was made of 60 subjects. The subjects were children with severe hearing impairments - more than 80 dB - aged 8 to 12 years and divided into a control and an experimental group. Before the beginning, the experimental and the control group were made equal in terms of the degree of hearing loss, communication abilities, IQ, age, sex and school achievement, and after the experiment their communicative ability was retested by means of the Communication Competence Scale and their school achievement was compared. The research scheme applied in the study is an experiment with parallel groups. The experimental group participated in a communication workshop on a daily basis for five months and learned Serbian sign language through various tasks and games. No activities were carried out with the control group. The data were statistically interpreted by means of the repeated measures two-factor analysis of variance. The results confirm that learning and improving Serbian Sign Language has positive effects on the promotion of verbal competence (receptive and expressive), global communicative competence and school achievement. The study has also confirmed that the Communication Competence Scale is valid, reliable and discriminative.