Digital pictures to enhance storytelling amongst special needs children

English has a difficult role to play since it is the second language for most Malaysian and in the Malaysian Education system for the special needs as there is no special syllabus for the autistic children. Children with autism are expected to learn the same thing with the rest of the children in the normal school. Autistic children have difficulty to concentrate and therefore the same learning syllabus with the normal children will make them difficult in acquiring the language in a short time. Even though, the normal children will have the difficulty of learning the language but they have a lot of time to learn at home or with their friends around them. In other way, the autistic children will have to learn more than the normal children. Autism is a complex developmental disorder that appears in the first 3 years of life, though it is some times diagnosed much later. It affects the brain’s normal development of social and communication skills. Autism is a spectrum that encompasses a wide continuum of behavior (Bailey, D. B., Jr., D. D. Hatton, et al., 2001). Core features include impaired social interactions, impaired verbal and nonverbal communication and restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior. This paper focuses on Asperger syndrome which is also considered as autistic spectrum. This paper investigates Asperger children’s motivation level when using digital pictures in creating a short story in the task based English language classroom and investigate the language use in the short story created by asperger children when using digital camera in the task based English language classroom. It is hoped that digital pictures able to enhance storytelling amongst the special needs children

Interaction pattern in a language classroom amongst special needs children: Imaginative learning approach

This research investigates the interaction pattern amongst special needs children while learning the second language. These children have asperger syndrome or asperger’s disorder which is a neurobiological disorder that described a pattern of behaviors in young boys or girls who had normal intelligence and language development, but who also exhibited autistic-like behaviors and marked deficiencies in social and communication skills (Kirby, 2005). Children with asperger syndrome can exhibit a variety of characteristics and the disorder can range from mild to severe. Children with asperger syndrome show marked deficiencies in social skills have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness. Therefore, this paper focuses on the nature, number and balance of interactions of ten subjects with asperger syndrome and further investigates the interaction pattern and reactions which occurred while using the Imaginative Learning Approach (IMA) (Normaliza Abd Rahim, 2006) in learning the second language. IMA is an activity where the subjects were given a scenario, for e.g. a hospital. A corner will be set up like a hospital and the subjects were given three times a week to play with their peers at the corner. The nature, number and balance of interactions were video-taped to find out the interaction pattern. The subjects consist of five males and five females (7 to 15 years old) with asperger syndrome from schools in Selangor, Malaysia. The introduction of IMA to the subjects managed to enhance the learning of the second language. It is found that asperger learners, able to concentrate and interact with their peers in IMA

Storyboard writing and adult learners: A pragmatic approach

A storyboard is essentially a timeline going from top to bottom, with the top occurring first. It is an expression of everything or even a rough sketch that will be contained in the program telling where the menu screens in a computer interface will look like, what pictures either still or moving will be seen when and for how long, what audio and text will accompany the images, either synchronously or hyperlinked or in other words allows us to see what the scene will look like. Typically, storyboards may be written documents and off-the-shelf storyboard pads for TV and video formats, adaptable for multimedia. The storyboard expresses, in one way or another, everything that can be seen or heard or experienced by the end-user of the multimedia program. It is more than a test-of-concept model, and just short of the final product specification document. Therefore, this paper investigates the content of discussion during storyboard writing and to investigate the meaning of the discussion. Five pairs of subjects were involved in this study. A task was given to each pair and the length of time for them to discuss about the layout and the content of the storyboard was 3 hours for each pair. The discussion will be taped and analyzed accordingly. The subjects were adult learners involved in a Language and Multimedia course ages between 33-40 years old, six female and four male. The subjects had no experience in storyboard writing. This paper uses the relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1985), an inferential approach to pragmatics