The Notional-functional approach to Improve deaf people language acquisition

Prelingual deaf learners experience difficulties in achieving receptive and expressive skills in verbal language. In this paper we aim to present some features of the Notional-functional approach presented through an e-learning environment created for the promotion of literacy skills in young deaf learners. The Notional-functional approach embraces any strategy of language teaching that derives the content of learning from an initial analysis of the learner’s need to express three different kinds of meaning: Functional (i.e. the social purpose of the utterance); Modal (the degree of likelihood); Conceptual – the meaning relations expressed by forms within the sentence (categories of communicative function). The data which was collected from the subjects has been analyzed by using DELE, an open source e- learning environment implemented within the FIRB-VISEL project1, funded by MIUR which, using an integrated editor, allows teachers to: - define a learning path by inserting texts, images, videos, and animations to be automatically integrated into the environment structure; - create an open source database by collecting materials produced by teachers working with deaf learners. The results of the investigation have revealed that the functional approach to deaf language instruction is more effective in acquiring grammatical accuracy than the structural approach. The study concludes with pedagogical implications and recommendations for the application of the functional approach in deaf language learning.