Objective: This study aims to find the most suitable type of oral narrative for assessing the transitivity system used by hearing-impaired students studying in ordinary schools with their hearing counterparts.
Methods: Three types of oral narratives, including personal narration, storytelling, and story improvisation were collected. The participants were eighteen hearing-impaired students (selected as an available sample) along with eighteen hearing students. Oral narratives were transcribed and analyzed using Halliday's transitivity system framework. And data analysis was carried out using SPSS 26 and based on the normality of the data in each of the transitivity indicators, two-independent samples t-tests and U Mann-Whitney tests were conducted.
Results: Findings revealed that all three types of oral narratives of hearing-impaired students contained transitivity indicators lower than average, this difference was significant for processes (p=0.047) and participants (p=0.029) in improvisation, and for circumstances only in Personal narrative (p=041). However, in the total three types of narratives, the median difference between the two groups is significant in all transitivity indices (p= 0.24, p=0.022, and p=0.001 for processes, participants, and circumstances respectively).
Conclusion: In light of the results of this research, the storytelling task, which is the most widely used form of assessment in communication disorders, cannot capture the narrative weaknesses of hearing-impaired students enrolled in regular schools, and it is necessary to use more spontaneous narrative tasks such as personal narration and improvisation of narrative in evaluating and rehabilitating these children.
