THE WRITING SKILLS ASSESSMENT AMONG STUDENTS WITH

AND WITHOUT HEARING IMPAIRMENT

Y. Serebryakova1, E. Ponomarenko2, Y. Krasavina2, O. Zhuykova2
1
The All-Russian State University of Justice (RLA of the Ministry of Justice of Russia)
(RUSSIAN FEDERATION)
2
Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University (RUSSIAN FEDERATION)

Abstract
The implementation of inclusive education in Russian universities faces a number of challenges,
including administrative and methodological issues. One of the major teaching problems is monitoring
students’ communicative competencies, particularly, monitoring their writing. It is important to assess
writing skills of hearing impaired students correctly, as their learning, cognitive skills and
communicative competencies, including writing skills (delivering a coherent message), are directly
related to the length of time and causes of their disability, rehabilitation, psychological well-being, and
the degree of involvement of families and school staff in the rehabilitation process. The distinctive
focus of our research is that the writing skills assessment is carried out on paper and digital platforms.
We have studied different ways of education quality monitoring of hearing impaired students and come
to understand the problem of establishing criteria for their writing skills assessment. In students
without disabilities, consistency (which is expressed in the sequence and structure of discourse), a
variety of lexical and syntactic features (which is expressed in the use of synonyms, antonyms,
rhetorical constructions, metaphors, comparisons), grammar correctness, informativeness (plot
availability), emotionality are successfully used as criteria for monitoring writing skills, while, in hearing
impaired students, almost all quantitative and qualitative criteria have to be seriously revised.
The paper compares certain criteria for monitoring writing skills among students with and without
hearing impairment and determines some corrected criteria for hearing impaired students.
Experimental results show that the main monitoring criterion for hearing impaired students is
emotionality (expressiveness), but it is supplemented by a number of others that have little or no
significance for students without disabilities, for example, the visual perception of sentence position in
the text, the appearance of semantic pauses connected with shifting a part of the sentence to a new
line. Our criteria will improve the methodology of humanitarian disciplines for teaching students with
disabilities at universities.
Keywords: Hearing impaired students, education quality monitoring, writing skills, inclusion experience
for students without disabilities.

1 INTRODUCTION
The implementation of inclusive higher education in Russia for young people with disabilities is linked
to the need to solve a number of administrative and methodological problems [1]. One of the teaching
problems is monitoring students’ communicative competencies, including their writing performance on
different platforms ([2], [3]). Monitoring writing skills of students with hearing impairment in the first and
second years of study involves three interrelated parameters: assessment of cognitive skills,
development of communicative competencies, and psychological skills to overcome deafness [4]. Our
practical experience underlines the need to use special criteria for assessing written works done by
hearing impaired students that are probably more accurate and flexible than those established for
students without disabilities.
It is appropriate to consider first educational requirements for writing skills that are common for
students with and without hearing impairment. Both are obliged to perform various types of written
work, such as: taking notes of a lecture (be able to structure some theoretical material), doing tests,
completing written assignments at seminars, doing homework, and performing review works. For
students with a health standard, all of these types of writing skills are a logical development of the
skills acquired at school, from the first grade and even earlier. For students with hearing impairment,
writing (in itself) can be a certain difficulty. For example, students, who are totally deaf and have
medical contraindications for implantation, speak sign language (and it is their main language), and

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written language is often perceived as a convention or a formality; and they do not recognize its
obvious advantages - diversity, expression of the sequence of thoughts, content richness. For this
group of students, writing (written speech) is often built using specific vocabulary with a minimum of
grammatical and syntactic constructions.
Students with and without hearing impairment do some work in electronic format (and now, with the
transition to distance learning related to COVID-19 disease, almost all written assignments are being
carried out in electronic format). However, if for students with a health standard it is not difficult to do
digital written assignments, for students with hearing impairment it is a challenge.
Accepting the ideas of Benjamin Kohler that typing and handwriting may affect students’ writing
performance and most students are not experienced enough in writing computer-based essays [5], we
turn to a more detailed analysis of essay writing skills and the identification of monitoring criteria to
apply to hearing impaired students’ performance.
To conduct the study, students with and without hearing impairment were asked to write a short essay
(up to 150-200 words) on the topic “My favorite time of the year”. Some essays were hand-written on
paper and some were typed on a computer. Special time was allocated for writing an essay in class
(up to 40 minutes). 27 hearing-impaired students (11 male and 16 female respondents) and 89
students with a health standard (46 male and 43 female respondents) took part in our study. The
participants were sophomores. The study was carried out in the 2016/17 academic year and in the
2018/19 academic year.

2 A WRITING ASSESSMENT SYSTEM OF STUDENTS WITH A HEALTH

STANDARD AND CLARIFICATION OF TRADITIONAL CRITERIA FOR
MONITORING WRITTING SKILLS
As noted by a number of Russian teachers who worked with students with a health standard ([6], [7]),
the main criteria for assessing writing performance (and in accordance with the federal state standard)
are:
• accuracy (clarity, monosemy and comprehensibility);
• depth of phrasing (the use of complex sentences, allowing to present in detail all the
circumstances in their interconnectedness);
• logic (sequence, consistency, manifested in a well-thought-out order of words in a sentence, the
order of sentences, the use of complex sentences and linkers);
• completeness (completeness of the expression of each thought, the use of clarifications, facts,
the minimum number of omissions of words);
• compositional harmony (the presence of clear boundaries of the utterance, semantic and
graphic division of the text into paragraphs, a thoughtful arrangement of parts of the text).
In fact, compliance with these criteria makes it possible to assess a student’s essay with an “excellent”
mark; consequently, a decrease in the score will be dictated by shortcomings in the performance
according to one or more criteria. In our study, we specify formal criteria (Table 1).

Table 1. Formal criteria for monitoring writing skills of students with a health standard.

2016/17 academic year 2018/19 academic year

№ Criteria
Female Male Female Male
1 Logic 38 22 41 38
2 Using language clichés 12 16 17 15
3 A variety of vocabulary 35 28 39 35
4 A variety of syntactic means 29 21 35 27
5 Grammatical correctness 42 38 43 35

In addition, student writing performance could be evaluated by some content criteria (Table 2).

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 Table 2. Content criteria for monitoring writing skills of students with a health standard.

№ 2016/17 academic year 2018/19 academic year

Criteria
Female Male Female Male
1 Expressiveness, emotionality 37 26 40 25
2 Mention of taste, color, auditory sensations 15 13 19 11
3 The ability to act at certain times of the year 31 29 35 37
(a variety of physical activity)

Some students associated their favorite time of the year with holidays, relaxation, whereas others –
with work or the possibility of part-time work. In a few cases, students called their favorite time of the
year in connection with sensations or experiences of warmth, happiness, freedom, tranquility, joy, the
beginning of a new life (a new stage in life), and a fairy tale. It is not surprising that for most
respondents their favorite season is summer, while winter and spring are named as favorite by only
10-16% of respondents both in 2016 and in 2019.
In general, for students with a health standard, such criteria for monitoring writing skills as logic (which
is expressed in the sequence and structure of discourse), a variety of lexical and syntactic means
(which is expressed in the use of synonyms, antonyms, rhetorical constructions, metaphors,
comparative clauses), grammatical correctness, informativeness (plot availability), emotionality are
successfully used.
For students with a health standard, the choice of platforms, on which the essay will be written, is not
so significant: almost all students in this group write the text sequentially, not separating the new
sentence with a new line, but dividing the text into paragraphs, combining several thoughts-sentences
into a common block.

3 A WRITING ASSESSMENT SYSTEM OF HEARING IMPAIRED STUDENTS

AND ADJUSTMENT OF CRITERIA FOR MONITORING THEIR WRITTING
SKILLS
Limited vocabulary, difficulties of constructing complex sentences and logically coherent texts,
grammatical incorrectness of phrases in writing performance of students with hearing impairment have
already been noted [8]. It is not surprising that such criteria for assessing writing skills of hearing
impaired students as consistency, depth of phrasing, accuracy, and compositional harmony will be
minimally manifested. These qualitative criteria for this group of students have to be reduced, especially
in the first year of study, as to the level of satisfactory performance of students with a health standard.
Quantitative criteria, such as a variety of lexical and syntactic constructions, have to be reduced even
more, as to the level of unsatisfactory performance of students with a health standard. As a rule,
hearing impaired students use simple and even primitive syntactic constructions (with a full
grammatical basis, with two or three subordinate parts of the sentence, without syndetic constructions
in complex sentences), do not use synonyms, polysemantic words, metaphors, antonyms.
However, indicators of emotionality in the text are very high - 96% of those who wrote essays, their
favorite time of the year is nearly always described using exclamatory syntactic constructions.
To evaluate the essay of students with hearing impairment, several additional criteria were identified
(Table 3). In the 2016/2017 academic year there were 8 female and 6 male respondents, but in the
2018/19 academic year there were 8 female and 5 male respondents of another year of student intake.

Table 3. Additional criteria for monitoring writing skills of hearing impaired students.

№ Criteria 2016/17 academic year 2018/19 academic year

Female Male Female Male
1 Expressiveness, emotionality 8 6 8 5
2 Rhythm, the occurrence of semantic pauses 6 4 7 4
3 Visual arrangement of sentences in the text 7 5 7 4

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Moreover, there are additions related to the choice of platforms for writing an essay to the new criteria
(Table 4).

Table 4. Additional criteria depending on the used platform.

2016/17 academic year 2018/19 academic year

№ Criteria
Female Male Female Male
Platforms paper digital paper digital paper digital paper digital
1 Expressiveness, emotionality 2 6 1 5 1 7 1 4
2 Rhythm, the occurrence of 1 5 2 4 2 6 2 3
semantic pauses
3 Visual arrangement of sentences 2 6 2 4 1 7 1 4
in the text

There is an assumption that students with hearing impairment find the visual arrangement of
sentences in the text important. To illustrate, the example of one essay (by Katerina M.) is worth
quoting.
“Fall!
Autumn has come!
It is beautiful!
I love autumn because it is colorful and beautiful.
I like to watch autumn landscapes.
Thanks to autumn
I have new ideas and plans.
I like to collect colorful leaves and put them in a book,
To keep in mind for life” (translation)
We drew attention to the occurrence of a pause in the sentences “Thanks to autumn (pause), I have
new ideas and plans” and “I like to collect colorful leaves and put them in a book (pause) to keep in
mind for life.” Here, obviously, with moving some part of the sentence to the next line, a semantic
pause appears, similar to the effect of writing posts on social networks, when writing and reading the
sentence from a new line visually turns out to be “attached” to the beginning of a new thought. In the
essay above, a semantic pause emphasizes the significance of autumn (“thanks to autumn”) and the
sequence of actions (“... put them in a book, to keep in mind ...”).
It should be noted that for students with hearing impairment, it is essential on which platform the essay
will be written. Choosing a digital platform, the hearing impaired begin a new sentence (and with it a
new thought) from a new line. In working with meanings, it is important for them not to combine, and,
on the contrary, to visually separate each new thought. This gives the text not only rhythm, dynamics,
but also marks each new thought as important. In other words, hearing impaired students do not
combine thoughts into larger blocks, like students with a health standard, but rather, with each new
sentence, they focus on a new emotion, detail, nuance of thought.
Surprisingly, how students with hearing impairment use the experience of writing texts on social
networks, because people with a health standard make a lot of posts on their social media every day
as well, but none of them have thought that texts outside social networks could acquire new sounding
and be perceived (including by the teacher) in a different way.

4 INCLUSION EXPERIENCE FOR TEACHNIG STUDENTS WITH A HEALTH

STANDARD
Since teachers often teach both students with and without hearing impairment, our study would be
incomplete if we did not describe one additional criterion that we identified on the essay material of
students with a health standard. This is an expression of irony, a criticism of other seasons compared

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to the favourite one. We drew attention to the criterion after evaluating student essay performance,
more precisely, after analysing the essays of the hearing impaired students. It was their essays written
with a great emotional strength that pushed us to return to the works of the students with a health
standard and took a fresh look at them. It turned out that irony and criticism of other times of the year
are used by up to 30% of students with a health standard, which had not been noticed by us earlier.
However, now we consider that this criterion is associated with the expression of the student’s
linguistic personality, firstly, and, secondly, with the skills of compositional arrangements of the text.

5 CONCLUSIONS
So, if such criteria for monitoring writing skills as consistency, a variety of lexical and syntactic tools,
grammatical correctness, informativeness, emotionality are appropriate for students with a health
standard, almost all of these monitoring criteria have to be seriously corrected besides the last,
emotionality, for hearing impaired students
The experimental results have shown that the main monitoring criterion for students with hearing
impairment in the first and second years of study is emotionality (expressiveness), but it is
supplemented by a number of others that are little or insignificant for students with a health standard,
for example, the visual perception of the arrangement of sentences in the text and the occurrence of
semantic pauses connected with moving some part of the sentence to a new line. The indicators of
other monitoring criteria are gradually improving (by the third or fourth year of study) due to extensive
reading of different literature (scientific, educational, journalistic, fiction) and constant practice in
writing texts of varying complexity, including creative works.
Our monitoring criteria will contribute to improving the methodology of teaching students with hearing
impairment for humanities teacher at universities. In particular, tasks on Philosophy, History, Russian
and English languages could be printed out on small cards in several lines like messages on social
networks starting each new sentence at the beginning of the line. The validity of the teaching method
should be statistically confirmed in the course of further research in both paper and electronic formats.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research for this paper was financially supported by RFBR, grant №19-013-00701 ‘The analysis
of visual information processing triggered by digital and non-digital platforms and its effect on mental
models development when teaching hearing impaired students’.

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