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As published in Odyssey, Fall 2003
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WITH DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS
A Model for Effective Communicative Practice

By David Stewart, Connie Mayer, and C. Tane Akamatsu

Exemplary teachers empower deaf students by encouraging them to take a more active role in their own learning. Through dialogue, these teachers guide students on a pathway of inquiry and self-expression that leads to a firmer understanding of the concepts they are learning. This pedagogical approach cuts across grade levels and subject matter.

We are nearing the end of a four-year “best practices” study of communication strategies that exemplary teachers of the deaf use in elementary and secondary education. Extensive analyses of teacher-student dialogue across grade level and subject matter have revealed that effective teaching occurs when teachers respond to students’ comments and queries in a meaningful and constructive manner that stimulates intellectual growth.

The premise of our investigation of effective communication strategies is that discourse is a key aspect of instruction—a notion that is often lost in a teacher’s attempt to conform to a particular form of signed communication, with or without speech, whether it be American Sign Language (ASL), English signing, or some form of contact sign (Mayer, Akamatsu, & Stewart, 2002). Indeed, a focus on the form of signing teachers use often overshadows the fact that, even with effective signed communication skills, teachers are in need of discourse strategies that can help them engage their deaf students in authentic learning.

Models: Maria Danso-Irizarry and Genera Ware and students in the Gallaudet University Children’s Instructional Summer Program and Kendall Demonstration Elementary School. PHOTO BY GOODMAN/ VAN RIPER

Talk about communication in the education of deaf children invariably centers on issues relating to the nature of the communication itself—its symbolic representation and use as a linguistic code (Akamatsu, Stewart, & Mayer, 2002). Are the teacher and students using speech or signing to communicate? If they’re using signing, is it English, ASL, or contact language? How does the signing of teachers compare with the way ASL is signed in the deaf community or presented in ASL textbooks? Should teachers talk while they sign? Should restrictions on the use of signing and speech be placed on teachers in an effort to implement a standard form of communication throughout a program? While educators and researchers have debated each of these questions, there is still little consistency among teachers in how to best communicate in the classroom.

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In actual practice, teachers of deaf children tend to settle into a personal comfort zone in communicating with their students. While students and teachers do understand each other, the ability to sign and be understood does not guarantee effective communicative practice in the classroom. A didactic model in which the teacher talks, the students listen, the teacher asks, and the students answer is predicated on the assumption that knowledge is imparted by the teacher (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988); in practice, such a model leads to deaf students being only marginally involved in constructing knowledge.

Investigating Effective Communication Practices

What is it that exemplary teachers of the deaf do? A group of nine teachers of the deaf in grades K-12 participated in the first two years of our four-year study. Identified by principals and supervisors as being exemplary in their ability to help students achieve academic success, each of these teachers also met the subject selection criteria of having taught a minimum of five years and of obtaining a satisfactory standing on the Sign Communication Proficiency Interview scale.

For this article, we examined transcriptions of teacher-student interactions in search of a sharply defined set of discourse strategies applicable to all teachers of the deaf, regardless of mode and form of communication. The strategies we identified embody two key concepts: dialogic inquiry and contingently responsive discourse behavior (Wells, 1999; see also Mayer, Akamatsu, & Stewart, 2002, for an initial report on the study’s theoretical framework and findings).

PHOTO BY JOHN CONSOLI

Although we took note of the varied nature of communication, the one feature common to effective practice in all nine teachers’ classrooms was the way these teachers engaged their students in the teaching and learning process. Students co-constructed knowledge with their teachers, actively engaging in dialogue as a means of developing their own understanding. Wells (1986) characterizes such teacher-student interactions as “contingently responsive,” i.e., the teacher uses students’ utterances to obtain clues about what they currently know.

Effective teachers use these clues to formulate feedback to the students that will help them achieve a higher level of understanding and ultimately devise a solution to the problem at hand. As well, these interactions need to support solutions to authentic problems that students find meaningful.

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Teaching and Learning Through Discourse

THE MODEL
Our model of communicative practices is based on three principles:

1. Focus on the content and meaning of what a student is saying.
2. Provide feedback that will help a student be an active participant in the construction of knowledge.
3. Ensure that classroom dialogue engages the students in genuine problem solving.
   

Some Strategies for Implementing the Model

1. Establish a common understanding of a question or topic. Through a combination of formal signs and mime, Sherie pretended to pour water off a globe into a 1,000 ml beaker to help her students conceptualize 1,000 ml of water as all the water in the world.
2. Take the students’ contributions as evidence of their current level of understanding and expand on them. Andrea’s class was studying peninsulas when Doug interjected that he had once lived on an island. Andrea capitalized on this comment to expand the discussion to comparing and contrasting islands and peninsulas.
3. Make explicit connections between student contributions and the topic at hand. Elaine’s class had just returned from speech class and was discussing the fact that they had talked about tools. At one point Rebecca stated, “You can’t touch it—it’s too dangerous,” without clarifying what “it” was. Elaine made explicit that children should not touch tools because they are dangerous. Rebecca followed up with a clear statement that Elaine, as an adult, could use tools.
4. Use questions as prompts. To decide whether or not multiplication was an appropriate strategy for solving a particular problem, Andrea set up three cups containing two, three, and two chips, respectively. She asked whether it was possible to use multiplication to figure out the total number of chips. Doug suggested multiplying two times three as a solution. In response to this incorrect attempt, Andrea broke down the process by repeatedly questioning the students to call attention to, first, the number of groups there were, and then to how many chips were in each group. She further clarified her explanation by moving her signs nearer to the manipulatives to connect the signing to the concrete representation.
5. Rephrase student contributions. Prior to reading the text, Sherie and Bobby were discussing the pictures in a book called Just Look at You. Sherie was trying to establish that the picture showed children playing in the rain. Misunderstanding, Bobby grabbed the book and signed, “white … teeth … smile.” Sherie responded, “Yes, they’re happy. But what’s this [pointing at the rain]?”
6. Summarize and restate what has been said. After several conversational turns during which students and teacher established that 70 percent of the world’s water is in the oceans and is therefore salty, Sherie summarized their collective understanding by referring to a beaker of water containing 30 percent of the original 1,000 ml (see strategy 1), stating that this represented all the fresh water in the world.

PHOTO BY GOODMAN/ VAN RIPER

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Language plays a crucial role in learning because it provides a code students can use to think about and internalize new concepts and information. Teachers who pointedly engage their deaf students in meaningful dialogue are providing them with opportunities to experiment with language and in the process become more adept at using it for self-expression. Our research reveals that engaging students in dialogues is a common thread in exemplary teaching that runs through all subject matter and every grade.

References

Akamatsu, C. T., Stewart, D., & Mayer, C. (2002). Is it time to look beyond teachers’ signing behavior? Sign Language Studies, 2, 230-254.

Mayer, C., Akamatsu, C. T., & Stewart, D. (2002). A model of effective practice: Dialogic inquiry in the education of deaf students. Exceptional Children, 68, 485-502.

Tharp, R., & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wells, G. (1986). The meaning makers: Children learning language and using language to learn. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry: Toward a sociocultural practice and theory of education. New York: Cambridge University Press.