Reading, Writing, and Literacy

Few American Sign Language (ASL) assessments are readily available for educators to administer and score to document deaf students’ skill levels and direct ASL instruction. Even fewer studies include deaf students with intellectual disabilities or document deaf students’ ASL skills across time. The present study reports deaf school-aged students’ receptive and expressive ASL skills using two readily-available assessments, the American Sign Language Receptive Skills Test (ASL-RST) and an ASL handshape sign generation task. Students attended a residential school for the deaf with a bilingual (i.e. ASL and written English) philosophy in the United States and were assessed across a four-year period. Results for a longitudinal subset of 29 students across three consecutive years are also included. In general, receptive skills strongly and significantly correlated with age, while more variation was found in expressive ASL phonological skills. Longitudinally, most students increased their receptive and expressive skills. Scores did not correspond with years at the school site, which was used as a proxy for years of ASL exposure. Results provide an age-band basis by which educators and researchers can compare deaf children’s sign language skills with their same-aged deaf peers on two readily available ASL assessments. Researchers can replicate this process for children and youth who use other sign languages as well. Implications for sign language instruction and future research are addressed.

BackgroundDeafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language delays.AimsWe compared deaf and hearing children's performance on a semantic fluency task. Optimal performance on this task requires a systematic search of the mental lexicon, the retrieval of words within a subcategory and, when that subcategory is exhausted, switching to a new subcategory. We compared retrieval patterns between groups, and also compared the responses of deaf children who used British Sign Language (BSL) with those who used spoken English. We investigated how semantic fluency performance related to children's expressive vocabulary and executive function skills, and also retested semantic fluency in the majority of the children nearly 2 years later, in order to investigate how much progress they had made in that time.Methods & ProceduresParticipants were deaf children aged 6–11 years (N = 106, comprising 69 users of spoken English, 29 users of BSL and eight users of Sign Supported English—SSE) compared with hearing children (N = 120) of the same age who used spoken English. Semantic fluency was tested for the category ‘animals’. We coded for errors, clusters (e.g., ‘pets’, ‘farm animals’) and switches. Participants also completed the Expressive One‐Word Picture Vocabulary Test and a battery of six non‐verbal executive function tasks. In addition, we collected follow‐up semantic fluency data for 70 deaf and 74 hearing children, nearly 2 years after they were first tested.Outcomes & ResultsDeaf children, whether using spoken or signed language, produced fewer items in the semantic fluency task than hearing children, but they showed similar patterns of responses for items most commonly produced, clustering of items into subcategories and switching between subcategories. Both vocabulary and executive function scores predicted the number of correct items produced. Follow‐up data from deaf participants showed continuing delays relative to hearing children 2 years later.Conclusions & ImplicationsWe conclude that semantic fluency can be used experimentally to investigate lexical organization in deaf children, and that it potentially has clinical utility across the heterogeneous deaf population. We present normative data to aid clinicians who wish to use this task with deaf children.

Perspectives on academic and social aspects of children’s school experiences were obtained from deaf and hearing children and their (deaf or hearing) parents. Possible differences between (1) the views of children and their parents and (2) those of hearing children and their parents compared to deaf children and their parents were of particular interest. Overall, parents gave their children higher school friendship ratings than the children gave themselves, and hearing children and their parents were more positive about children’s friendships than were deaf children and their parents. Both children and parents also saw deaf children as less successful in reading than hearing children. However, deaf children having deaf parents, attending a school for the deaf and using sign language at home all were associated with more positive perceptions of social success. Use of cochlear implants was not associated with perceptions of greater academic or social success. These and related findings are discussed in the context of parent and child perspectives on social and academic functioning and particular challenges confronted by deaf children in regular school settings.

Editor's introduction The topic of role models, raised in Chapter 8, is explored in depth by Erting, She reports here on an ethnographic study of three deaf preschool children interacting with their hearing teacher and a visiting deaf adult. From her examination of the videotaped interactions and from interviews, Erting was able to distinguish clear differences in orientation between the deaf and hearing adults. In spite of her training and experience working with deaf children, the hearing teacher consistently adopted hearing strategies in her interactions that often led to misunderstandings and miscommunication. This apparent refusal by the teacher to accept fully that the children were deaf, and a tendency to treat them as trainees for a hearing society rather than as deaf children, distinguished her from the deaf adult whose orientation was appropriately visual and Deaf. This detailed observation and analysis of a single situation complements nicely the survey data presented by Woodward, Allen, and Schildroth in Chapter 8 and adds strength to their concerns about the ramifications of their findings. If Erting s findings are typical – and there is no reason to suspect that they are not – her recommendation that more deaf teachers be hired would help to ameliorate the problem, as would the better training of educators of the deaf in cultural, linguistic, and cognitive aspects of deafness. Erting s preference for a team teaching approach with one deaf and one hearing teacher is a particularly good one and lends itself readily to the kind of bilingual approach advocated by Strong in Chapter 5 .

This study investigated peripheral vision (at least 30° eccentric to fixation) development in profoundly deaf children without cochlear implantation, and compared this to age-matched hearing controls as well as to deaf and hearing adult data. Deaf and hearing children between the ages of 5 and 15 years were assessed using a new, specifically paediatric designed method of static perimetry. The deaf group (N = 25) were 14 females and 11 males, mean age 9.92 years (range 5-15 years). The hearing group (N = 64) were 34 females, 30 males, mean age 9.13 years (range 5-15 years). All participants had good visual acuity in both eyes (< 0.200 LogMAR). Accuracy of detection and reaction time to briefly presented LED stimuli of three light intensities, at eccentricities between 30° and 85° were measured while fixation was maintained to a central target. The study found reduced peripheral vision in deaf children between 5 and 10 years of age. Deaf children (aged 5-10 years) showed slower reaction times to all stimuli and reduced ability to detect and accurately report dim stimuli in the far periphery. Deaf children performed equally to hearing children aged 11-12 years. Deaf adolescents aged 13-15 years demonstrated faster reaction times to all peripheral stimuli in comparison to hearing controls. Adolescent results were consistent with deaf and hearing adult performances wherein deaf adults also showed significantly faster reaction times than hearing controls. Peripheral vision performance on this task was found to reach adult-like levels of maturity in deaf and hearing children, both in reaction time and accuracy of detection at the age of 11-12 years.

There is a long history of investigations reporting that deaf children lag behind hearing peers in learning, problem solving, and creativity. In this chapter we describe the kinds of evidence that led to such conclusions and the extent to which they appear to be valid today. Early research concerning cognitive development in deaf children often was aimed at understanding intellectual growth “in the absence of language.” Other investigations involved tasks that required comprehension of English or histories of reading. More recently, we have come to understand that both kinds of evaluation might be biased against deaf children. Still, ways in which deaf children’s atypical histories of language functioning and educational experience might influence their cognitive development are largely unexplored. There have been a variety of studies dealing with deaf children’s cognitive skills, and especially memory, sometimes including consideration of language fluencies and degree of hearing loss. More recently, various tests of cognitive ability have been developed that are nonverbal in nature or can be administered through sign language. The extent to which those tests accurately reflect the thinking skills of deaf children still remains poorly understood, as does the question of whether such tests tap the same skills that they do in hearing children. Further, some people still make the appealing but dubious assumption that cognitive development is essentially the same for deaf and hearing children (see Braden, 2001; Marschark &amp; Lukomski, 2001, for discussion). Studies of intelligence and academic abilities of minority and underprivileged children during the 1960s and 1970s led to a concern about the lack of cultural fairness in testing. It was recognized at the time that the nature of children’s early environments could influence later performance on intelligence measures and academic achievement. This issue was never adequately addressed with regard to deaf children, most of whom clearly have early childhood experiences that could cause differences in test performance. As a result, deaf children were often described as “deficient” or as “concrete, literal thinkers” who were unlikely to be able to grasp the kinds of abstract concepts necessary for academic success.

Reading achievement among deaf students typically lags significantly behind hearing peers, a situation that has changed little despite decades of research. This lack of progress and recent findings indicating that deaf students face many of the same challenges in comprehending sign language as they do in comprehending text suggest that difficulties frequently observed in their learning from text may involve more than just reading. Two experiments examined college students' learning of material from science texts. Passages were presented to deaf (signing) students in print or American Sign Language and to hearing students in print or auditorially. Several measures of learning indicated that the deaf students learned as much or more from print as they did from sign language, but less than hearing students in both cases. These and other results suggest that challenges to deaf students' reading comprehension may be more complex than is generally assumed.

The process of developing self-image in the deaf child is examined from the perspective of symbolic interactionist theory. Deaf children with deaf parents are compared to deaf children with hearing parents. It was predicted that deaf children with deaf parents would demonstrate more positive self-images because of the presence of family communication (the manual language of signs) and the less traumatic reaction of the family to a diagnosis of deafness. Evidence from test scores, teacher-counselor ratings, and family interviews indicates that the deaf children with deaf parents made more positive self-evaluations, as predicted. It is suggested that differences in parental expectations for academic and communicative achievement, in relation to the child's ability to fulfill parental goals, is a prime influence on self-image. The child's definition and interpretation of his own situation, relative to siblings and peers, is also important.

Abstract: This study aims to determine the social interaction of deaf students with regular students, classroom teachers, special supervisors and to know the strategy of fostering deaf students in the development of social interactions. The method used in this study is a qualitative descriptive method. The subjects in this study were one special supervising teacher (GPK), one class teacher, one student guardian and one deaf child in 'aisyiyah bustanul athfal. Data collection techniques using interviews, observation and documentation. This study describes social interactions between deaf students and regular students, namely by using local sign language, having imitation or imitating behavior, associative behavior such as cooperating and having a sense of concern for friends, and dissociative behavior that is sensitive and difficult to control emotions when regular students disturb them. The interaction of deaf students with teachers uses local and national sign languages, the teacher provides a positive stimulus so that the nature of suggestions and feelings of comfort appear when together with the teacher. Strategies for fostering deaf students in the development of social interactions by developing skills using lip language and sign language as well as emotion regulation.

Semantic categorization: A comparison between deaf and hearing children

Deaf children vary in the use of and proficiency in signed language. The majority of studies on writing skills of children who are deaf did not assess deaf children's proficiency in signed language and/or grouped together deaf children with varying sign language skills. Adopting a bimodal bilingual perspective, we examined evaluative expression, an important narrative tool in both oral/written languages and signed languages, in narratives written in Dutch by deaf children who are proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) and deaf children who are low-proficient in SLN, and hearing monolingual and bilingual children. We hypothesized that deaf children who are proficient in signed language use their knowledge of evaluative expression in signed language to enrich their narratives in written Dutch, and more so than deaf children who are low-proficient in signed language and hearing monolingual and bilingual children. We examined the use of eight different evaluative devices in narratives written by deaf proficiently and low-proficiently signing children, and hearing monolingual and bilingual children. Narratives were also examined for morpho-syntactic errors and use of complex sentences. The results show that proficiently signing deaf children's narratives contain more evaluative devices that enrich the referential structure of the narrative than narratives of low-proficiently signing deaf children, and hearing bilingual and monolingual children. We propose that proficiently signing deaf children use their knowledge of SLN to convey evaluation in their written narratives, and thus have an advantage in enriching their narratives. This study also shows that in order to gain insight into deaf people's writing, it is important to take variations in sign language proficiency into account.

Human civilization has made tremendous progress, to improve its quality of life. However, there are still a number of people in society who suffer from grave disadvantages due to their disabilities. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, and even though science is rapidly developing, it is impossible to completely erase those causes. Ameliorating education and offering vocational training for the disabled are considered as effective solutions to provide these people with a satisfying life, especially children. For deaf children, the dream of normal schooling becomes great. Limited language proficiency leads to limited communication skills and reduces confidence when entering the first grade, adversely affecting their academic performance and later development. Therefore, in this article, we focus on first grade deaf children. Like the impact of normal language on normal children, sign language plays an important role in language development of deaf children. They use sign language to think and communicate. However, to study in textbook programs as does a normal child, in the classroom of deaf children, both the teachers and students must use finger alphabets to teach and learn Vietnamese. We thus study teaching Vietnamese to deaf children and suggest games to draw their attention to the lessons.

Mathematics anxiety and mathematical calculation in deaf children: A moderated mediation model of mathematics self-efficacy and intelligence

Two experiments examined the problem-solving strategies of deaf and hearing students from seven years to college age in the context of the ‘Twenty Questions’ game. Overall, deaf children were significantly less likely than hearing peers to ‘win’ the game within Twenty Questions, and problem-solving appeared less efficient and less cognitively sophisticated among deaf than hearing students at all ages. Deaf and hearing children who had played the game before were equally likely to use winning strategies. However, inexperienced hearing children typically discovered the ‘correct’ strategy, whereas inexperienced deaf peers did not. Reflectivity–impulsivity, as measured by the Porteus Mazes Test (Experiment 1), was unrelated to problem-solving performance in children and revealed no effects of hearing status. Possible causes and implications of the observed effects are discussed as they relate to early experiences of deaf children and their lack of early, effective access to language.

In Türkiye, K-12 Deaf students often do not learn English as hearing students learn. This paper applies a qualitative approach and uses semi-structured interviews as the data source to analyze the perspectives of nine teachers of Deaf students on Deaf students' access to English as a foreign language education in Türkiye. In analysis, the study applies content analysis and considers Bourdieu's forms of capital, the theory of figured world, and social model of disability as the theoretical framework. The findings show that teachers of Deaf students in Türkiye have an ideology of Deafness as a culture, view Turkish Sign Language as the primary language of Deaf individuals, and support using sign language as a medium in Deaf education. However, teachers of Deaf students prefer postponing English as a foreign language education for Deaf students until Turkish Sign Language is fully acquired. The findings of the study suggest integrating Turkish Sign Language in K-12 Deaf education as a medium and designing education programs to teach English as a foreign language to Deaf students simultaneously without postponing learning any languages.