Literacy with Deaf/HH Students

Reference

Abstract

Ewoldt, C., Israelite, N., & Dodds, R. (1993). The ability of deaf students to understand text: A comparison of the perceptions of teachers and Students. American Annals of the Deaf, 137 (4), 351-361.

Reading Materials

Sixteen high school students and 9 of their teachers were interviewed for their perceptions of the interest level and difficulty of 3 texts. The teachers tended to underestimate their students' ability to comprehend independently and misjudged whic h text their students would find most enjoyable. The students judged the most difficult text most interesting, and used more metacognitive strategies when reading this text, suggesting that difficult materials should not be avoided or simplified for deaf students.

Ewoldt, C. (1991). The early literacy development of deaf children. Educational and Developmental Aspects of Deafness, D. F. Moores and K. P. Meadow-Orlans, (Eds.), Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 85-89.

Emergent Writing

This pilot study examined the early writing attempts of 4 deaf children of hearing parents. The children were 3- to 4-years-old at the beginning of the Study, which lasted 6 months. The children were read to at least three times a week Books were m ade available, and daily 10-minute sessions for free writing were established, but no formal reading or writing instruction was given. The students demonstrated their awareness that markings on paper can be representative of real objects. Developmental li teracy concepts, similar to those observed with hearing children were identified in the children's writing.

Ewoldt, C. (1990). The early literacy development of deaf children Educational and Developmental Aspects of Deafness, D. F. Moores and K. P. Meadow-Orlans, Eds. Washington, DC Gallaudet University Press,89-114.

Literacy Development

This longitudinal study followed ten 4- and 5-year-old deaf children over a 3-year period. Nine of the children had deaf parents. Some of this research was reported in Manson (1982) and Ewoldt (1985). The thrust of this Study was to describe the vi deotaped literacy tasks performed by the children. These included writing a letter, writing a story, reading that story that day, reading a book, retelling the book, dictating a story that day and the next. The children more readily agreed to each task by the third year Children voluntarily edited their writing and demonstrated an awareness that print is involved in reading. Their development supported the hypothesis that deaf children and hearing children demonstrate similar behaviors and take similar pa ths toward literacy.

Ewoldt, C. (1985) A descriptive study of developing literacy of young hearing impaired children. In Kretschmer, R. R. (Ed.), Learning to Write and Writing to Learn, The Volta Review, 87,109-126.

Emergent Writing

The researcher examined the developing literacy of 4- and 5-year-old deaf children of deaf parents over I year's time. The focus was the children's writing in school, but the study also looked at the children's art, reading, and through-the-air sto ry production. instructional strategies were used to help the children develop an awareness that meaning can be constructed from and through print. Samples from the children indicated that writing was used to convey meaning, generate messages using mock le tters and some conventional letters. They used some similar spelling strategies (copying from a print source and spelling from meaning cues) and began to use writing conventions (punctuation and spaces) in their writing.

Ewoldt, C. (1983). Text simplification: A solution with many problems. Perspectives for Teachers of the Hearing Impaired, 1(5),23-25,

Deficiencies in Rewritten Reading Materials

This investigation challenged the common practice of writing or rewriting for the purpose of "simplifying the text by making the syntax less complex and the vocabulary less vaned. Ewoldt's analysis of simplified text such as Reading Milestones < /I>stories suggested that the simplified stories were actually more complex because they lacked predictability, cohesion, and other support that is found in naturally-written language.