Developing Teaching Materials for Spanish Heritage Speakers with Hearing Loss

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to address the challenges of teaching gender agreement to Heritage Speakers (HS) of Spanish with a mild, moderate, and moderately-severe hearing loss. I discuss a series of combined approaches (TBL) and strategies (Input Enhancement) that can be implemented to create instructional materials to facilitate the perception and processing of gender agreement cues in the auditory modality. The aim of this interdisciplinary study is to provide resources and materials to instructors that teach HS who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) by presenting a sample didactic unit that was connected to the student’s environment and experience. Moreover, this thesis is innovative because the methods used in the didactic unit are not only beneficial for HS who are DHH, but also for L2 learners with normal hearing levels. If we consider that both groups face similar difficulties in the processing of gender agreement in Spanish, the strategies employed in this thesis to emphasize the key elements for processing gender, such as Cued Speech, prosodic stress, and color-coding notation, could also be useful, if adapted, to L2 learners who may have different learning styles (e.g., visual, auditory, and kinesthetic).