Descriptive English Compositions of Visually Impaired Students in Kenyan Secondary Schools

Abstract

Vision is crucial in normal language acquisition because it is responsible for a great deal of human communication. The absence of this can lead to significant changes in language patterns due to insufficient input and reinforcement from the visual channel. Descriptive writing, which is sometimes called showing writing, involves the use of elaborate sensory language, specific details and concrete words. The aim of any descriptive writing is to create a mental picture of what is being described to the reader. Visually impaired learners like their sighted counterparts, need to describe the world around them. Lack of vision as the primary channel of description may affect the kind of writing they do. Despite studies having been conducted on the visually impaired learners, there is little documented literature on descriptive compositions for this population. This paper therefore examined the written works for the visually impaired students with a view to determining the descriptive characteristics found in the students’ written English compositions. Further, it sought to establish the descriptive characteristics that were likely to disadvantage the visually impaired students. The study was carried out in Salvation Army (hereafter S.A) Thika High school for the visually challenged persons. The school is found in Thika town, Kiambu County in Kenya. A descriptive research design was used. The population of the study comprised form three visually impaired students and their teachers of English. The students were asked to write a descriptive composition on a given topic. These compositions formed the linguistic data for this study. Additional data was collected from purposively sampled teachers using questionnaires to elicit data on the descriptive features in the students’ compositions, and an interview schedule to obtain data on the descriptive characteristics that were likely to disadvantage the visually impaired students. The findings revealed that concepts denoting colour, shape, size, movement, texture and space were difficult to conceptualize hence difficult to describe. Most of the information a human being receives, comes from the vision channel. Consequently, in order for one to give a good description, the brain combines the visual details with other sees. Keywords: Descriptive power, descriptive writing, legal blindness, visually impaired, vision.