Reading and Deaf Children

1
Reading and Deaf Children

• By Julie Angione
• Sean Arnold

2
Progress

• Students who are deaf or are hard-of-hearing
  progress at an extremely slow rate
• Their gains typically take 3-4 years compared to
  the 1 year it takes a child without a hearing
  impairment

3
Factors

• Being deaf or hard-of-hearing influences a
  childs development of literacy
• The main difficulties are in phonemic awareness,
  vocabulary, syntax and the use of knowledge and
  metacognitive skills

4
Cornerstones-Phase 1

• Cornerstones is funded by the U.S Department of
  Education (1998-2000)
• Focuses on technology used in the classroom for
  literacy instruction
• Phase 1 is a literacy approach for young students
  who are deaf or hard-of-hearing
• Phase 1obtains information based on the
  technology feasibility and approach

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Key Aspects of Cornerstone

• Poor readers do not learn much of the words they
  encounter in context during reading
• They do not possess the range of skills that
  enables them to use context effectively
• They are also not likely to read and therefore
  benefit from multiple exposure to words

6
Effective Approaches

• Research suggests that the most effective
  approaches used by teachers are emphasizing
  semantic elaboration techniques such as semantic
  maps, semantic feature analyses, word maps and
  classroom discussions of words
• Students should be included in developing their
  understanding of words, become immersed in the
  words and experience the words repeatedly in
  multiple contexts

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Technology and Media

• The need for visuals has kept special schools the
  leader in educational uses of media
• Today the majority of deaf and hard-of-hearing
  students are educated in the public schools
• Teachers end up using mainstream curricula,
  materials and lesson plans even-though those
  materials do not address the students special
  needs

8
Technology and Media

• Some popular stories in the media have been
  translated into sign language by professional
  deaf storytellers
• Different versions have been adopted such as
  storybooks, CD-ROM and fables
• http//pbskids.org/lions/cornerstones/

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Cornerstones Program

• Offers an animated story from the U.S public
  television series designed to develop literacy
  skills
• Each show discusses new vocabulary
• A keyword is selected from the story and the word
  family and vowel sound become the focus of a
  series of short skill-building segments for
  beginning readers

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Cornerstones Program cont

• Teachers are able to present the story aloud in a
  language (ASL or English) or mode (SEE)
• There are print storybooks and a hypertext
  version of the story that allows students to
  click on words to learn more about them
• A unit consists of language and ideas of 1 short
  story for 2 hours every day over 6 days

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Stories

• ASL (American Sign Language)
• ..\..\..\..\Desktop\Click, Clack, Moo (ASL).mov
• CS (Cued Speech)
• ..\..\..\..\Desktop\Click, Clack, Moo (CS).mov
• SEE (Signing Exact English)

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Cornerstone Program-cont

• Each lesson the days words are exposed many
  times in various forms both conversational (oral
  or sign) and written contexts
• At least 2 meanings or usages of each word are
  introduced
• Children talk about what they know about each
  word, while the teacher expands their
  understandings.

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Summary

• Technology allows the same information to be
  provided in alternate forms, giving children
  different ways to interact with the same
  materials
• Overexposure through repetition and varied
  formats are crucial for deaf and hard-of-hearing
  students

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References

• Loeterman, Mardi, Paul, Peter V., Donahue,
  Sheila. READING AND DEAF CHILDREN, Reading
  Online, 10961232, Feb2002
• Cornerstones Building Blocks of Literacy
  http//pbskids.org/lions/cornerstones/