Alfabeto manuale e abilità di lettura

Overview & Synopsis

The volume aims to present and evaluate some intervention programmes in which the visuo-gestural modality has been used as a communication and a reading support, in different educational and developmental contexts. Sign language appears to be a valid instrument of inclusion not only for deaf people but also for hearing children, with communication disorders. This is the case of the study we conducted in a primary school class, in which we used sign language as an inclusive means of communication for a non-verbal autistic child. Furthermore, we discuss Sillabiamo, a reading method based on fingerspelling, the manual alphabet used in sign languages. We conducted five case studies in order to verify the effectiveness of this method and to improve its features. In three of them, Sillabiamo is used as a first approach to reading; we used it with two groups of pre-school children (3;4-6;2) and a case of Down’s Syndrome associated with verbal dyspraxia (10;2). In the other two case studies, Sillabiamo is used as a support to specific reading difficulties in a case of Cornelia de Lange’s Syndrome (7;9) and a case of suspected SLD. These studies reveal promising results of the use of Sillabiamo in the contexts we analyse. Sillabiamo gives participants useful information and tools towards the objective of decoding a written text or overcoming difficulties in fluency and accuracy in reading.