Diploma Programme in English Literacy Skills for the Deaf

Objectives

The objectives for this Programme are:

  1. To equip young and talented deaf adults with literacy skills in English at an intermediate level.
  2. To raise educational opportunities for young and talented deaf adults

Programme Structure

The Programme is a full-time ten months programme, consisting of four modules.

The four modules and their outlines are listed as follows:

  • Module 1 – Developing Reading Skills I
    • This course will focus on techniques that are essential for grasping the general message of a text. The three fast-reading-related skills to be taught in this course include:
      1. how to get an overall idea of the text by reading through a text quickly (skimming)
      2. how to look for specific information in a text (scanning)
      3. how to understand the meaning of vocabularies in context (guessing)
  • Module 2 – Developing Reading Skills II
    • Apart from continuing practicing basic reading skills such as skimming, scanning and guessing vocabulary in context, students will be taught advanced reading skills essential for understanding more complicated texts. These skills include:
      1. Previewing: how to get a sense of the structure and content of a text by looking at the titles, section headings, and photo captions.
      2. Predicting: how to use one’s existing knowledge to make predictions about content of a text.
      3. Identifying overall structure: how to identify the logic of the paragraph or group of paragraphs.
      4. Critical reading: how to make judgment about the content of a text and draw implication from a text from it’s literal meaning.
  • Module 3 – English Grammar for Intermediate Learners
    • This course will cover a wide range of English usage associated with different grammatical categories. Examples include different kinds of determiners within noun phrases, temporal and adverbial modifications, general meaning of prepositions, different types of connectives, and some commonly used phrasal verbs. Different types of exercises, such as controlled and meaning drills, guided meaningful practice, cloze passages and proof reading, will be used to increase the students’ awareness of the grammatical rules.
  • Module 4 – Exploring English Sentence Structure
    • This course offers a concise description of the basic sentence structures of English from a linguistic perspective. Students will be taught the basic grammatical elements of a sentence, their classification, and their respective functions, e.g. different grammatical relations, types of verbs, parts of speech. In addition, the students will learn how to analyze English sentences at the phrasal, clausal and sentential levels. Examples include different types of phrases, co-ordination, subordination, finite vs non-finite clauses.