The effect of autobiography method on comprehension skill of hearing-impaired students

Autobiography is a kind of narrative writing about a person written by that same person. Indeed, it is a type of writing about self that is full of subjectivity and experience. The present study investigated the effect of autobiography method on the comprehension skill of hearing-impaired students.
International Standardized Reading Literacy Questions (2001) was employed for data collection. Six hearing-impaired students from special female schools of Shahriar city, Iran, in the range of severe to profound hearing impairment were selected as control (n=3) and experimental (n=3) groups. Autobiography method was used for the experimental group during 23 sessions of hearing rehabilitation training.
In the experimental group, mean score of posttest was significantly higher than that of the pretest in levels one and two of comprehension process (p0.05). In the control group, there was no significant difference between post and pretests in all the four levels (p>0.05).
Autobiography as a teaching method focuses on the lived experiences of the individual. In so doing, student's experiences are discovered, expressed, and interpreted, and students are committed to improving their writing skill through achieving a broader set of language functions. Furthermore, boosting language skills can improve comprehension in hearing-impaired students.