Measuring Syntactic Maturity in the Written Performance of Tunisian Deaf Students

This study seeks to investigate the effectiveness of integrating Tunisian deaf students into mainstream schools. It evaluates the suitability of these practices and their effectiveness in improving their syntactic maturity. The data collected during the study are based on triangulation of methods. A questionnaire was addressed to ten deaf students integrated in mainstream schools in Sfax, Tunisia, an interview to their teachers, and twenty writing samples collected from the observed population. The results found indicate that, overall, syntactic maturity of Tunisian deaf students did not improve when they were integrated in public schools. The T-unit mean scores of deaf students’ written output revealed that integration did not help this minority achieve a better syntactic maturity in the second semester. Teachers’ interviews also provided negative feedback about integration policies in the Tunisian classroom context. This article is a contribution to the research literature about deaf education which is scarce in the Tunisian EFL context.