Abstract
For over 30 years, literacy has been recognized as a key concern in Special Education Needs (SEN) and especially in Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) education. No different in Mauritius, these children struggle to get passing marks in French language at elementary level. Addressing this concern, literature has been reviewed in the context of games for SEN and DHH education. Taking advantage of the potential of gamification, simple letter games have been developed using LiveCode. The games were administered to a sample of 14 SEN and DHH elementary students using the underlying action research theoretical framework. To assess the effectiveness of the games, the students' level of motivation after using the games was measured using the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS) based on Keller's (2010) ARCS motivation model. The results demonstrated the potential of using LiveCode to develop timely serious games to support SEN and DHH students' literacy skills.
TopBackground
Special Educational Needs (SEN) refer to learners with learning, developmental, and physical disabilities; communication, emotional, and behavioral disorders; and learning deficiencies (Bryant et al., 2019). In Mauritius, around 25% of children with disability are categorized as severe to profound, and those children normally attend SEN schools because they need resource assistance or require direct attention from Special Needs teachers (Ministry of Education Tertiary Education Science and Technology, 2017). A sub-category of SEN includes Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children. The delayed exposure to a first language in DHH children affects language acquisition and the development of a second one (Humphries et al., 2014; Mayberry, 2007).
Over the past decades, research has shown that performance on short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) tasks highly predicted academic achievement in reading and language comprehension (Cain & Oakhill, 2006). Research suggests that learning fails or is hampered when the task demand exceeds memory capacity (Ayres & Van Gog, 2009). Further, deficits in memory processes have been found for children with disabilities (Pickering, 2006); such as reading disabilities (Swanson et al., 2009), speech and language impairments (Archibald & Gathercole, 2006), attention deficit or hyperactivity disorder (Rapport et al., 2008), and intellectual disabilities (Henry & Winfield, 2010).
Research has also shown that gamification has had the most success with struggling learners or students with SEN (El Mawas et al., 2019; Jong, 2015; Lan et al., 2018; Wajiuhullah et al., 2018). The studies (Cano et al., 2018; El Mawas et al., 2019; Jong, 2015; Wajiuhullah et al., 2018) indicated a higher level of motivation and learning participation when games were used with children having SEN. These students often receive this type of specialized instruction because of the lack of success with the sole use of a traditional approach (de Freitas, 2018; Jong, 2015). Nowadays, teaching strategies not only include frameworks from past approaches, but support their incorporation with new findings and technologies for the growth of the education system (de Freitas, 2018; Florian, 2021).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Acoustic Awareness: This refers to the perception of sound or the sense of hearing.
Phonological Awareness: The ability to understand and recognize the sound structure of the spoken language.
Deaf: This refers to people with a hearing loss so severe that there is very little to no functional hearing.
Phonological Coding: This refers to the mapping between ‘seen’ speech and its cognitive representations in the development of phonological awareness in Deaf learners and does not necessarily include acoustic awareness.
SEN Schools: These are those that provide educational services to children with special education needs due to disabilities such as motor, physical, visual, auditory, intellectual or due to other specific educational needs.
Hard of Hearing: This is when there may be enough residual hearing that auditory devices, such as hearing aids, provide adequate assistance to process speech.
SEN Teachers or Educators: This refers to teachers who have been trained in special education and are qualified in the SEN sector.
Special Education Needs: A learner with Special Education Needs is one having learning, developmental, and physical disabilities; communication, emotional, and behavioral disorders; and learning deficiencies.