Chaining Strategy and Language Comprehension Development among Deaf Pupils in Tanzania

Comprehension among deaf pupils in Tanzania has been a persisting problem for decades. Interesting enough, deaf pupils in the country have been attending primary education for ten years whereby chaining strategy has been a common strategy for teaching them reading skills. Despite the use of chaining strategy which is being promoted by different scholars in the world as a strongest strategy in promoting reading skill, still, deaf graduate with poor reading ability. Thus, the current study intended to find out the usefulness of chaining strategy in developing language comprehension among deaf pupils in Tanzania. The study was conducted in four special primary schools for deaf from Dare es Salaam, Njombe, Kagera and Tabora and was guided by the theory of simple view of reading and (VARK) model. It employed mixed research approach with a convergent research design. In-depth interview and a five Likert scale questionnaire were used to collect data from 20 teachers, while test as well as observation were employed in collecting data from 162 deaf pupils. Data were analyzed through descriptive, simple linear regression and content analysis. It was revealed that chaining strategy had significant contribution in developing deaf pupils’ ability of generating meaning from individual words (p = .000) and short sentences (p = .002). On the other side, chaining strategy had insignificant influence in developing deaf pupils’ ability of generating meaning from long sentences (p = .672) and reading texts without challenges (p = .089). The conclusion drawn from the findings was that, chaining strategy does not guarantee the development of language comprehension among deaf pupils, unless extra innovations are done. It was recommended that, deaf need to be identified and exposed to sign language in early ages, also early grade teachers need to be competent in sign language.