Effect of Communication Literacy Intervention (CLI) on Sign Language Knowledge (SLK) among Special Needs Deaf and Dumb College Students in Nigeria.

Communication is indispensible in human population. This study investigated the effect of communication literacy intervention (CLI) on sign language knowledge (SLK) among special needs deaf and dumb college students (SNDDCS) in Nigeria. The study adopted experimental research design involving a purposive sampling of 48 SNDDCS in Nigeria between March and June, 2021. The eligible participants were randomly assigned either in treatment (n=24) or control (n=24) group respectively. Only the participants in the treatment group were exposed to CLI manual while both groups participated in pre-posttest measures of sign language knowledge questionnaire -SLKQ with reliability index (r=0.87). The IBM SPSS version 22 was applied for all statistical computations. The results were deemed significant at p≥0.05. The findings showed that the participants in the treatment group recorded very high SLK scores in the posttest (80.6%) and follow-up (81.7%) measures when compared to the pretest low SLK score (46.2%), implying a significant increase in SLK. Statistically, significant differences were reported within demographic variables and intervals. Thus, no significant difference existed on gender (p=0.090>0.05) and location (p=0.680>0.05) while differences were observed on age by birth (p=0.002<0.05) and school type (p=0.011<0.05). Also, significant difference was observed on pretest (p=0.001<0.05) and follow-up (p=0.010<0.05) intervals while none was recorded on posttest measure (p=0.061>0.05). Therefore, the CLI has significant effect on SLK of SNDDCS in Nigeria. The adoption of language intervention such as CLI in special needs colleges is crucial in improving knowledge and use of sign languages by deaf and dumb students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]