Effects of Bilingual Approach in Malay Language Teaching for Hearing Impaired Students

Abstract

This study aims to identify the effects of Bilingual Approach (BA) on the teaching of Malay language for deaf student in comprehension skills and effect of deafness level to comprehension acquisition. The study was conducted through quasi-experimental comparison between the use of Bilingual Approach (Experimental Group) and the use of Manually Coded Malay (Control Group). Changes in the Malay language skills between the two groups are identified through text comprehension. The study involves 64 hearing impaired students from primary school aged 11 to 12 years as subject sample in Malaysia. There are 32 students for the Experimental Group and 32 students for the Control Group. Data for the overall skills performance were analyzed using one-way ANOVA and two-way ANOVA calculations. The findings indicate that the overall achievement for Experimental Group is significantly higher with the use of Bilingual Approach [F dk(1,63)=113.501. p=<0.01] as compared to the Control Group. The results also show significant difference between mildly deaf students and severely deaf students with the value of t (63) =13.97, p<0.05. There is a need for more comprehensive studies to be carried out at a higher level in order to further explore the outcome of Bilingual Approach to language comprehension among students with hearing impairment.