Portrait of a Deaf Mauritian Student: How I propose to use educational games to ease up struggles faced in French elementary classes

Abstract

Yearly in Mauritius, only a few deaf and hard of hearing students manage to get a passing mark in French language at elementary level. This shows that those students are encountering difficulties to perform well in this subject; in that they struggle to read and write. French language is basically the second or third language of deaf and hard of hearing students; after the bilingual -bicultural model of MSL (Mauritian Sign Language) and English, and Creole.Since no single method addresses all needs and the focus of the research lies in the need to improve knowledge transfer from teachers to deaf students, a combination of methodologies is necessary; thus the importance of the living theory approach. The project shall encompass developing educational games, and multimedia through the pragmatic paradigm point of view, exploring the practical relevance of the tools; while the theoretical framework will be based on action research. The purpose of the research is however not to replace the actual means of teaching French language to deaf students; but to rather act a paradigm shift to the current teaching method.A preliminary research showed that people learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone(Mayer & Anderson, 1992; Mayer & Moreno, 2002); and that games can potentially shape users’ behaviour(Dicheva, Dichev, Agre, & Angelova, 2015). Drawing from literature review to better understand whether or not Deaf and Hard of Hearing learners (DHH) may benefit from both multimedia and games in the classroom, a simple and appropriate learning aid which focuses on individually tailored behavior from specific criteria will be analysed.In this paper we will discuss the difficulties faced by Deaf students in French classes, how literature suggests that multimedia and gamification be used to ease up their struggles, and my proposed solution for a typical case study. Paper ID 183