Abstract:
The three objectives of this thesis were as follows: 1. To analyze the errors occurring in deaf students Thai writing in Setsathian School, which educates deaf students. 2. To compare the errors occurring in deaf students Thai writing between boy and girl deaf students. 3. To find out whether the existent researches on the improvement of deaf students writing skills in Thailand and foreign countries are suitable to help improve a deaf childs writing and suggest other suitable teaching tips for use with deaf students. The instruments used to collect the data were five sets of writing tests which depict cartoons or cartoon characters doing activities and the tested students write a caption in a sentence or sentences formed with a word or words provided. These written tests were verified for reliability prior to adoption. The results show that there are three habitual errors among Thai deaf students. The first error is syntactical error; the second error is semantic error, and the third is spelling error. The syntactical errors mostly occur in the usage of verbs in a sentence. The semantic errors show that although deaf students can compose a sentence with complete subject, verb and object; nevertheless, the sentence as a whole may not be understandable or may be meaningless. The spelling errors are mostly with consonants. The potential causes for these three errors are language interference, problematic language development, and carelessness. The interference of Thai sign language occurs, for instance, when the tested students are inclined to write a Thai sentence with Thai sign language structure. Problematic language development includes word omission or words out of order. Carelessness also interferes and mainly causes misspelling. A comparison between boys and girls written errors found that girls make less errors than boys. From the study of other research relating to how to improve writing skills, it is found that appropriate solutions can be categorized into four main measures: skill improvement in sentence structure, skill improvement in meaning-expression, skill improvement in word spelling, and skill improvement in sentence practice, which combines multi-skill improvements. In the researchers opinion, deaf children need to learn the concept of how to use a word and its meaning. Parents can help their deaf children by showing them the labels of letters or symbols with their meanings before admission to school. Besides this, teachers who prepare lesson plans should realize the difference between boys and girls. Moreover, teachers should provide teaching materials that deaf children can study on their own when they have free time and which get them involved and communicating with their classmates in writing activities. The most important advice from the researcher is that we should have positive thinking and a good attitude toward deaf students language errors and encourage deaf students not to feel embarrassed. This would be a great tool and big step to improving their language later on.