Developing Software of English Teaching for Deaf Students Using Visual Cognitive Ability of Signers

随着互联网和电子邮件等技术的进步，聋生学习英语的动机也在稳步增加。然而，在过去的十年里，大学和学院的支持系统以及英语教学方法几乎没有改善。需要为经常上英语课的聋生开发英语教学软件。在设计英语教学软件时，要充分利用签名者的特殊视觉感知，在实验的基础上设计了一个英语教学软件模型。例如，在我的一个实验中，我以多种方式呈现了英语单词，并比较了这些方法对签名者视觉认知和记忆的影响。结果表明，手写者对运动词语的视觉认知和视觉记忆能力优于静止词语。我建议在词汇部分，将一个英语单词多次移动，同时在屏幕上的不同位置(1)从中心到外部或(2)从外部进入中心是有益的。随机运动是否比常规运动更有效(例如，一个接一个地散开)取决于受试者。我的实验还表明，签名者同时感知了几行英语句子，我们应该在阅读部分利用这些句子。例如，一部电影的一个场景的完整演讲可以同时出现在屏幕上，这样学习者就可以学习句子的语法结构。在语法部分，几行句子应该在屏幕上从右向左移动，并用日语和手语翻译。

The numbers of deaf university students are increasing and with the advance of technology such as the Internet and e-mail, deaf students' motivation to study English has steadily increased. However, the support systems at universities and colleges as well as English teaching methods have improved little during these past ten years. English teaching software for deaf students who attend regular English classes needs to be developed. We should take advantage of signers' special visual perception when we design English teaching software.I designed a model of English software based on some experiments. For example, in one of my experiments I presented English words in many ways and compared the effects on signers' visual cognition and memory. The result showed that signers were better at visual cognition and visual memory of moving words than still words. I propose that in the vocabulary section it is beneficial to move one English word many times and at the same time at the different places on the screen (1)from center to outside or (2)outside into the center. Whether the random movements are more effective than regular movements (eg.one-by-one-spread) depends on the subject. My experiment also showed that the signers perceived a few lines of English sentences simultaneously, which we should take advantage of in reading sections. For example, a whole speech of one scene of a movie can be put on the screen simultaneously, so that the learners could learn the grammatical structure of the sentences. In the grammar section, a few lines of sentence should be moved from right to left on the screen with translation in Japanese and sign language.