Keys to English Print:

As published in Odyssey, Fall 2003
See that Sound!...in PDF (11 pages, 193 kb)

See that Sound!
Visual Phonics Helps Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students Develop Reading Skills

By Bettie Waddy-Smith and Vanessa Wilson

Reading is fundamental to the educational process, yet it is one of the most complex skills a student must master to ensure academic success. According to the National Reading Panel Report, a comprehensive reading program should include instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and text comprehension. While many students, both deaf and hearing, learn to read despite lack of access to all possibilities of literacy training, some students may benefit significantly from phonics as they develop reading skills.

There is much instruction for hearing students that incorporates a variety of multi-sensory approaches to improve reading, such as the Wilson Reading System, the Lindamood-Bell Programs, the Orton-Gillingham Program, Phono-Graphix, and Touch Phonics. See-the-Sound Visual Phonics is a system designed to meet the unique challenges of deaf students.

Visual Phonics, developed in 1982 by the International Communication Learning Institute, is a multisensory approach, using tactile, kinesthetic, visual, and auditory feedback to improve reading, writing, and speech skills in deaf students and other children and adults who do not learn readily from traditional reading approaches. Visual Phonics is used to improve reading through the development of phonological awareness skills, writing through the development of spelling skills, and speech through the development of articulation/mouth movements.

Visual Phonics is a system of 45 hand cues and written symbols that help students make the connection between written and spoken language. Each hand cue is suggestive of how a sound is made. For example, the handshape for the /F/ sound is made by placing the four fingers on the thumb with the palm facing your mouth then quickly flicking the fingers upward off the thumb, representing movement of lips and teeth. Each sound has a written symbol and each written symbol is a visual representation of the hand shape and represents the same sound regardless of the spelling. For example the /F/ handshape and written symbol would be the same for the /FAH/ sound in both phone and fish. The handshapes and symbols help students make sense of the various spellings and reinforce the sound/symbol connection.

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Genie Chisholm, speech/language pathologist, uses Visual Phonics in a Kendall classroom.With Visual Phonics, deaf students can participate in phonological awareness activities and phonics instructions. Photos by Goodman/Van Riper.

Using Visual Phonics

Visual Phonics can be easily integrated into any reading, speech, and language program. It is recommended, however, that the system be used within the context of a language-rich, print-rich environment in which multiple language experiences are provided.

Cued Speech and Visual Phonics: How Do They Differ?

Visual Phonics and Cued Speech are different in both structure and intent. In Cued Speech, sounds are represented by a combination of designated handshapes and positions in conjunction with mouth movements. As defined by the National Cued Speech Association (2000), Cued Speech is a sound-based visual communication system. In English, it requires eight handshapes in four different locations in combination with the natural mouth movements of speech, to visually differentiate the sounds of spoken language (http://www.cuedspeech.org/).

Visual Phonics differentiates each sound by representing it with a different handshape and movement that mimic how the sound is produced. It is a tool to assist in decoding and producing the sounds in the English language. It was not designed to be used in conjunction with spoken conversation. The goal is to clarify the sound symbol relationship between spoken English and print.

Visual Phonics can be used with deaf students who use any communication methodology. It can be used as needed to help with pronunciation during speaking or decoding during reading. As the child internalizes the English sound/symbol code, use of Visual Phonics fades.

Activities

These activities enable the incorporation of Visual Phonics into traditional phonologic awareness activities:

• Rhyming words—When introducing rhyming words, present the words using Visual Phonics hand cues. With the hand cues, deaf students can see the similarity in how the words look, in the same way that hearing students hear the similarity in the words.
  
• Phoneme counting—Have students count phonemes by using the Visual Phonics hand cues to allow them to see how many phonemes are in a given word.
  
• Oddity task—When discriminating the beginning, ending, and medial sounds in words, use the Visual Phonics hand cues to permit deaf students to see which words begin or end with the same or different sounds and to identify what the specific sounds are.
  
• Sequencing and segmenting sounds— Present sounds in words via Visual Phonics hand cues to provide visual feedback and enhance the student’s ability to sequence/segment the sounds in words.

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Visual Phonics at the Clerc Center

At the Clerc Center, speech pathologists/communication specialists use Visual Phonics to develop and refine phonological and phonemic awareness in students from their earliest years through high school. The introduction of Visual Phonics while children are still infants occurs as a natural part of speechreading awareness and provides children with an early opportunity to associate what is seen on the lips with what is presented on the hand. Visual Phonics hand cues are presented in a natural way within the baby’s visual field without calling direct attention to the hand.

Visual Phonics shows great promise in preparing elementary students to learn to read. Students make the connection between what they see on the lips, i.e., speechreading, what they say, i.e., speech production, and what they see in print, i.e., reading. The children quickly make the connections and begin to incorporate the system into their reading. Visual Phonics provides opportunities for analytical ‘word work’ that includes knowledge of rhyming, unique spellings, multiple word meanings, dictionary skills, and other skills that support reading. It appears to be helping students connect sounds, letters, and words with what they already know about concepts learned through American Sign Language. It also reinforces concepts about English conveyed through text, fingerspelling, speech, listening, and speechreading.

The American Speech–Language– Hearing Association notes that poor readers have deficits in: phonological awareness, phonological memory, phonological retrieval, and phonological production. The speech/language pathologists at the Clerc Center have found that deaf students who have problems with the reading process have a similar profile. They have difficulty with: sequential memory for letters in words, sequential memory for words in sentences, decoding or encoding words, production of appropriate mouth movements, awareness of sound/symbol relationships, and speech production.

Support from Research

Author Vanessa Wilson presents the word read through Visual Phonics.The x under the a indicates that the letter is silent. Photos by John Consoli.

Research has shown that phonemic awareness increases the reading and spelling skills in preschoolers and kindergarten children (Yopp, 1992; Ball & Blachman, 1992). It is important for all children to acquire an understanding of how the English language is represented in print (Paul, 2000). For deaf students who do not have easy or complete access to spoken language, Visual Phonics provides access to phonological information that has been shown to be important in the reading process. By focusing on a visual representation of the sounds of spoken language, deaf students can “see the sound” in the same way hearing students “hear the sound.” This gives the deaf students the opportunity to play with representations of sounds and internalize them. While the hearing students do this auditorily, Visual Phonics enables deaf students to do it visually.

A 1995 study that looked at the use of different reading strategies in whole language instruction with deaf students found that the use of bottom-up strategies, i.e., decoding of words, tended to distinguish skilled deaf readers from average deaf readers (Kelly, 1995). An earlier study revealed that temporal recall may put the deaf reader at a disadvantage in recall of linguistic stimuli (Hanson, 1990). Educators have suggested that use of tactile-kinesthetic phonics (phonological recoding) may enhance sounding out of words by deaf readers (Dolman, 2000). It is hypothesized that Visual Phonics, through use of visual, tactile, and kinesthetic cues, stimulates phonological recoding, improves working memory, enhances temporal recall and visual processing, and provides a means to visually decode words.

In 1987, psychologist Dr. Bill Kachman and speech/language pathologist Vanessa Wilson of Gallaudet University did a preliminary study of training in phonetic awareness by using visual and kinesthetic stimulation to help improve a deaf child’s reading skills. Kachman and Wilson worked with a 9-year-old, profoundly deaf student with a high average IQ, excellent conversational sign language skills, and reading scores that were below average. The Brigance Comprehensive Inventory of Basic Skills measured the child at the first-grade level and comprehension at the beginning of first grade. Wilson worked with the student three times a week for 20 minutes using Visual Phonics. By the end of the year, the student was using word attack skills, producing more understandable speech, and producing more appropriate mouth movements. In addition, the parents reported that he was attending to and attempting to read captions on the television. When retested, his word recognition had jumped to the second-grade level and reading comprehension was at the upper second-grade level. The Visual Phonics training appeared to have enhanced the student’s phonological awareness and skills and thereby contributed to his overall improvement in reading.

Visual Phonics also appears to help speech development. A preliminary study (Wilson, 1987) of six pre-adolescent deaf students whose speech was considered to be unintelligible showed great improvement with the use of Visual Phonics. The students instructed with Visual Phonics acquired targeted sounds more readily and rapidly than did comparable groups of students who continued with traditional therapy approaches. In addition, improvement was shown in the production or approximation of sounds that were not targeted; students also produced the correct number of syllables in words when Visual Phonics was used. More testing is needed, but our preliminary research indicates that Visual Phonics improves phonological skills, reading skills, spelling skills, speech skills, and working memory.

Teachers Respond

Visual Phonics is used by teachers in programs throughout the country. Linda Schumann, a teacher of deaf students in San Diego, California, noted, “I feel Visual Phonics is a key…to help integrate phonics into speech, language, and reading activities. I have used Visual Phonics with children [who are] hearing and profoundly deaf….They learn it quickly and do well with it. I just love it!”

Jodi Blohme, a teacher of deaf students in Boward County, Florida, agreed. “I have seen great success with my students with Visual Phonics,” she said. “It is especially helpful with spelling dictation. If [students] are confused by a word, I give them the Visual Phonics cues and they usually get it right. I use Visual Phonics with my alphabet chant every morning.”

Perhaps the greatest advantage of Visual Phonics is that by allowing deaf students to see the sounds of English, it gives them a tool to use in developing one of the most important skills, reading.

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References

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2001). Roles and responsibilities of speech-language pathologists with respect to reading and writing in children and adolescents. The ASHA Leader, Supplement No. 21, pp. 17-27.

Ball, E., & Blachman, B. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26: 49-66.

Dolman, D. (2000). To construct meaning from print: Developing phonological awareness in profoundly deaf children. Odyssey, 2(1).

Hanson, V. (1987). Phonology and reading: Evidence from profoundly deaf readers. Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Hanson, V. (1990). Recall of order information by deaf signers: Phonetic coding in temporal order recall. Memory and Cognition, 18(6), 604-610.

Kelly, L. (1995). Processing of bottom-up and top-down information by skilled and average deaf readers and implication for whole language instruction. Exceptional Children, 61(4), 318-334.

LaSasso, C. (1996, May/June). Phonics for deaf children? Why not? Perspectives in Education and Deafness, 14(5).

Paul, P. (2001). Language and deafness (3rd ed.). San Diego, CA: Singular, Thomson Learning, Inc.

Wilson-Favors, V. (1987, November/December). Using the visual phonics system to improve speech skills: A preliminary study. Perspectives in Education and Deafness, 6(2).

Yopp, H. K. (1992). Developing phonemic awareness in young children. The Reading Teacher, 45, 696-703.