Since more and more children with special needs are included in preschool programs, educators are more often in contact with deaf and partially deaf children. They have to provide optimal conditions for their development. The graduate thesis titled Sociopragmatic skills of hearing, deaf and partially deaf preschool children included in the kindergarten is focused on possible differences in sociopragmatic skills of the hearing and the deaf and partially deaf children. It consists of a theoretical and an empirical part.
In the theoretical part, concepts as communication, pragmatics, sociopragmatic skills are presented and the phenomenon of hearing loss is described. Some ways of adjustment for deaf and partially deaf children in the kindergarten are stated.
In the empirical part, a survey on sociopragmatic skills in deaf, partially deaf and hearing preschool children included in the kindergarten is presented. The survey was conducted through a questionnaire including the scale of sociopragmatic skills filled out by parents and educators of deaf, partially deaf and hearing children. The sociopragmatic skills in the scale are divided into two subgroups: the skill of assertiveness and the skill of responsiveness. I found that there were differences in sociopragmatic skills between hearing and deaf or partially deaf children. The hearing children had higher scores of their sociopragmatic skills than their deaf or partially deaf counterparts. However, only the differences in the development of the responsiveness skill were statistically important. In the hearing children, both the assertivness skill and responsiveness skill are present, whereas the responsiveness is well developed, and assertiveness is poorly developed or nascent. In most deaf and partially deaf children, the responsiveness is nascent or well developed, and assertiveness is nascent. Since parents see children in a different environment as educators, there were higher scores in scales filled out by parents than by educators, both for the responsiveness skill as for the assertiveness skill, however, they are statistically unimportant.
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