A Case Study on Narrative Analysis of School-Aged Children Using Cochlear Implant

Abstract

This case study analyzed the narratives retold by two school-aged children using cochlear implants (CI), and two normal hearing children (NH) matched in their age and grade with the CI users. The participants with CI have used oral communication and enrolled the mainstreamed education setting. The standardized language test was administered before collecting narrative data from all participants. The CI1 and CI2 scored at -2 and within ±1 standard deviation, respectively. The retold narratives were collected using the nonword storybook “Frog where are you?”. The narratives were transcribed and analyized into two ways to see both microstructure and macrostructure of the narratives. For the macrostructure analysis, two parts of Korean Narrative Assessment recently developed by Pae et al. was applied with the story grammar analysis proposed by Stein and Glenn (1979). The story grammar analysis results showed that CI1 and two NH constructed their narratives similarly each other with the five story grammar components, but CI2 showed a little deficient knowledge in ‘Setting’ and ‘Internal Reponse’ categories with fewer number of utterance to retell the story than the others. The microstructure analysis results informed how the participants used their vocabulary and syntactic knowledge at the discourse level, which showed partly inconsistent with the standardized test score. The results of this case study showed the disparity among the word and sentence, and text level of language abilities, so that each level of language skills, especially the text level, is necessary for the assessment and intervention for school-aged CI children.