Long Term Effects of Lip Reading vs. Sign Language on Deaf IranianEFL Language Learners’ Vocabulary Acquisition

As lip reading and sign language are two common ways of teaching to deaf and hard of hearing students, this quasiexperimental study was intended to compare effects of implementing lip reading and sign language on acquisition of vocabulary among hearing impaired Iranian EFL learners. In addition, the study was aimed to scrutinize long termeffects of such instruction on the participants. Therefore, 29 female deaf Iranian EFL learners were divided into the sign language (SL = 14) and lip reading (LR = 15) groups. 20 vocabulary items were selected as the instructional materials and were presented to the participants during a four-session treatment. A posttest-only design, followed by a delayed posttest, was used to examine the acquisition and retention of the target vocabulary. The results of the posttest showed that both methods (lip reading and sign language) were effective in the acquisition of the words, and that there were no statistically significant differences between participants of the SL and LR groups in the posttest. The results of the delayed posttest, however, indicated that sign language was a more effective method in the long term. The participants of the SL group tended to retain the effects of the treatment more than those of the LR group. Results have important implications for the deaf education and can be supported by theories of meaningful learning, especially subsumption

Keywords:

lip reading , sign language , hearing impaired , deaf , vocabulary acquisition