Effectiveness of Creative Drama on the Language Skills of 4-6 Year-Old Children with Cochlear Implants

The most important problem in hearing impaired children is difficulty in communication, because hearing loss prevents them from hearing the other's speech or results in incomplete hearing of other' speech. The current study examined the impact of the intervention program based on creative drama on the language skills of 4-6 year-old children with hearing impairment and cochlear implant.
An interventional experimental study with pre-test and posttest and control group was carried out. Participants consisted of 30 hearing impaired children with cochlear implant who were selected using convenience sampling and were divided into two experimental and control groups. The language skill of both groups before and after intervention was assessed via a story retelling test.
Comparing the average of seven subscales of retelling story test in the two experiment and control groups, using multivariate regression analysis, it was found that in all the seven subscales, there were significant differences between the experiment and control groups and in terms of syntactic complexity subscale, due to the differences in the pretest of the two groups, the observed difference in the posttest between the two groups cannot be explained by the treatment. These findings suggest that the creative drama was effective on the language skills of hearing impaired children.
Rehabilitation of hearing impaired children, including speech therapy and auditory training, are always performed in formal meetings and often these children are not excited enough to use these trainings. That is why the education process is very time-consuming and energy-intensive. Based on the findings of the present study, a demonstration and training opportunities for indirect teaching of language structures has a noticeable impact on the children's language skills and these children demonstrated good progress in using correct forms of language structures after this intervention.