Rounding-augmented reality book and smartphone for deaf students in achieving basic competence

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.

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.

The ability to organize the referential content of narrative has usually been investigated as a mark of the development of discourse skills. In this study, the pragmatic use of pronominal and nominal forms of reference in written stories was considered instead as a mark of literacy development in deaf and hearing students. Participants in the study were 17 deaf high-school students, 17 school-age matched hearing controls, and 16 hearing second-graders (novice writers) who were asked to write a picture-story, Frog, Where are you?, for a hearing reader who was unacquainted with it. Results revealed that deaf students appear to use the same variety of referential devices as hearing students when writing and, in most cases, these devices are used appropriately. However, the referential strategies of the deaf students were more nominal and less anaphoric than those of their hearing peers. It is concluded that the referential strategies of deaf writers are only superficially similar to those of hearing novice writers, suggesting that deaf students' referential strategies in writing are not merely the product of a delay in development of discourse skills.

Phonetics Curriculum Development and Implementation for the Deaf University Student Darlene Geer Gould Deaf university students are among the undergraduate and graduate students in communication disorders programs. The deaf students train to clinically and educationally work with communicatively impaired individuals, particularly hearing-impaired persons. The population to be worked with by the deaf students may be comprised of infant, preschool, elementary, secondary, college, mature adult, or elder segments of society. In addition, the deaf communication disorders students may aspire to clinical research positions as career goals. A thorough understanding of theoretical constructs underlying the subject of phonetics and possession of, or at least considerable familiarity with, phonetic transcription skills is essential to the deaf communication disorders specialist. This paper addresses phonetics curriculum development and implementation concerns in conjunction with educational instruction of deaf university students. Five areas of curriculum design and the implementation necessary for learning phonetics as a deaf university student are outlined and discussed. 1. Programmed workbook materials which are organized to incrementally increased levels of difficulty must be available to each deaf student. Keys to workbook exercises should be contained within the workbooks or accompany the workbooks so that students can check their own work. Such curriculum provisions will allow students to be self-paced in the course. Carefully designed graded practice materials are particularly important to deaf students because such students cannot avail themselves of opportunities, indeed required experiences, to listen to phonetics audio tapes which are traditional modes of learning for phonetics transcription training involving sound identification. The deaf enrollee in a phonetics class will need to work from the printed page to supplied transcription sheets. A great variety of activities can be designed to introduce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols and to encourage abundant practice in IPA tranThe author is the Clinic Coordinator, Department of Communicative Disorders at San Diego State University. scription. Not only will variety allow for graded levels of difficulty, but it will ensure maintenance of student interest. Types of workbook assignments might encompass a wide range of tasks, a few of which are suggested here. How many sounds in the words? Find words with high front vowels; Find words with low front vowels; Find words with mid front vowels; Find words with high back vowels; Find words with low back vowels; Find words with mid back vowels; Find words with central vowels; Find words with fricative sounds; Find words with plosive sounds; Find words with affricate sounds; Find words with nasal sounds; Write orthographically represented words from IPA; Find the errors; Write in IPA from orthographies; IPA sentences; IPA paragraphs; and IPA crossword puzzles. It is obvious that the deaf student cannot be expected to transcribe conversational speech. Although he/she needs to learn about regional dialects and foreign accents, theoretical knowledge will be derived regarding the nature of speech production variations rather than from direct listening experiences. 2. Technological instrumentation providing visual speech displays and tactile speech feedback is directly instructive to the deaf phonetics students. Visual and tactile modalities offer identification and verification information about human speech. Distinctive feature information can be illustrated via sonograms, speech oscilographs , video-tape, tactile phonation instruments , articulation film, cineflourographic studies , visual vocal pitch display instruments, speech analyzers of various kinds, sound level meters, oral manometers, etc. Speech sound transition information derived from spectographic analysis will impart information about rapid sequencing of articulatory movements which will be A.A.D. /August 1982 447 Phonetics Curriculum Development learned to the greatest extent through the auditory modality by the hearing student. 3. It is particularly important for a comprehensive clinical phonetics textbook to be an integral part of the course. The deaf student will probably more completely rely upon the text for scholarly input than will hearing students in the same class, even though deaf students may glean information from class lectures via speech reading , sign from an interpreter, or an official note taker. Supplementarily, rather thorough bibliographic resource materials must be accessible to the deaf student. 4. Multi-media materials such as illustrated phonovisual charts which show tongue, lip, jaw, velar, and laryngeal action for sound production will be referred to time and time again by the deaf student. Drawings, molds, simulated articulatory structures...

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.

Some 53 deaf and 33 hearing college students observed a videotaped lecture followed by a 15-minute period of reviewing prepared class notes. Two days later half of each group again reviewed the notes before taking a test measuring learning outcomes in four areas: (a) recall, (b) recognition, (c) concept acquisition, and (d) problem solving. Multivariate analysis of variance showed that repeated review was much more helpful to deaf students than to hearing students on the recall and recognition measures, but not on the higher level learning outcomes. It was further shown that hearing students outperformed deaf students on each of the four dependent measures. It was concluded that repeated review is more beneficial to deaf than to hearing students and that it selectively affects memory tasks (recall, recognition) more than tasks requiring higher level processing (concept acquisition, problem solving).

Hearing loss can be a major detriment to academic achievement among students. The present comparative study examines the differences in mathematics motivation, anxiety, and performance in female students with hearing loss and their hearing peers. A total of 63 female students with hearing loss (deaf and hard-of-hearing) and 63 hearing female students were selected to participate in the study. The two groups of students were matched in terms of the city of residence, academic year, academic grade, and age. The Mathematics Motivation Scale and the Mathematics Anxiety Survey were used for data collection. The students’ mathematics scores in the first and second semesters of school were used as indicators of their mathematics performance. The data obtained were analyzed using the MANOVA. The results of the study showed a higher intrinsic goal orientation in both hard-of-hearing and hearing students than in the deaf students; extrinsic goal orientation was higher in the deaf and hard-of-hearing students than in the hearing students; and task value, control belief, and mathematics self-efficacy were lower in the deaf and hard-of-hearing students than in the hearing students. The findings of the study also showed that mathematics test anxiety and mathematics anxiety were higher in the hard-of-hearing and deaf students than in their hearing peers. Moreover, mathematics performance was higher in the hearing students than in their deaf and hard-of-hearing peers.

ON NOVEMBER 15 TO 16, 2002, the Gallaudet Research Institute (GRI) sponsored the national conference Stakes Testing: Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children Being Left Behind? held at the Gallaudet University Kellogg Conference Center. Three hundred people from forty-two states participated, including teachers and counselors of deaf students, school administrators, teacher educators, experts on educational testing, educational researchers, test designers, members of deaf advocacy associations, parents of deaf children, and representatives of various governmental agencies. The conference was a major event featuring introductory remarks by Gallaudet President I. King Jordan and Stephanie Lee, the director of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs, a keynote address by James Popham, author of The Truth About Testing: An Educator's Call to Action and many books on and evaluation, and presentations by other nationally known experts on and testing-related issues, including Jay Heubert, co-editor of the National Research Council's High Stakes: Testing for Tracking, Promotion, and Graduation, Carolyn Massad, the national consultant for English language arts at Harcourt Educational Measurement, Neal Kingston, the senior vice president and chief operating officer of Measured Progress, Martha Thurlow, director of the National Center on Educational Outcomes, and Shalia Cowan, director of the Texas Education Agency's Division of Services for the Deaf. Also featured were many presentations from the front lines by educators of deaf and hard of hearing students. GRI director and conference co-chair Michael Karchmer said at the opening of the conference that presenters had been selected to represent a broad range of opinion. He predicted that all in attendance would have much to learn and that consensus was unlikely. He advised attendees to keep their minds open as they weighed one perspective against another and to be prepared to change their minds. The scope of the conference presentations was too broad to summarize adequately in a brief article. This essay, therefore, pursues a limited range of important recurring themes of the conference. Testing and Deaf Students' Difficulties with English Midway through a series of panel presentations by educators of deaf students on the first day of the conference, Michael (Mickey) Jones, director of the Evaluation Center at the Illinois School for the Deaf, told a story that evoked many nods of recognition. In 1992, he said, he'd participated in a task force set up in Illinois to make decisions about the appropriateness of the Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) for use with special education students. His role had been to examine the test, then inform the task force about difficulties deaf and hard of hearing students might have taking it. He had told the task force that deafness can have a severe impact on reading and writing ability and that results on the IGAP-a challenging paper and pencil test-might misrepresent the true capabilities of most deaf students. To illustrate, he had described a bright fifteen-year-old deaf boy whose performance IQ was 133 and whose math computation skills were above grade level. The boy was fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and could demonstrate a broad range of knowledge in ASL. On standardized tests, however, his reading level had been measured at six grades below the average for his hearing peers. After seeing a sample of this boy's writing, the task force had decided that deaf students in Illinois should be waived from taking the IGAP. But that was 1992, ten years before the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was signed into law. Everyone in Jones's audience got the point: Things are different now. stakes testing is about to become a reality for deaf as well as hearing students in a growing number of states across the country. In the near future failing these tests will have serious consequences in state after state. …

This research aims at analyzing the practices of linguistic interactions between deaf and hearing students in a regular school in the city of Santarém-PA, western region of Pará. It was based on the historical-cultural, which includes the individual as a being produced historically in its relation to culture. For data collection, interviews were conducted with a semistructured script with 8 regular teachers and 1 teacher from the Specialized Educational Service (AEE). Data were analyzed through the following categories: 1) Teacher training to work with deaf students; 2) Conception of Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS); 3) Linguistic interaction practices with deaf students 4) Conception of the role / partnership between resource center teachers and regular teachers in the education of the deaf and 5) Evaluation of inclusion of the deaf in regular education. With the analysis of the data it was noticed that most of the teachers do not have specific training to work with the deaf student, except for the ESA teacher; teachers are clear about the importance of Libras as an important instrument for the interaction and learning of the deaf, although they do not understand it well as a natural language; about 7 among the 9 teachers interviewed have difficulties regarding interactions with their deaf students through LIBRAS; positive despite the difficulties. It is concluded that the inclusion of the deaf in the analyzed school must overcome the level of socialization and advance to the development of meaningful learning of deaf individuals.

Teaching English to Brazilian deaf students faces specific challenges, as English is their third language, followed by Portuguese and Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) as L2/L1, respectively. Traditional English classes emphasize oral production and comprehension; thus, personalized guidance that addresses the specific linguistic needs of deaf students is lacking in national educational documents. This study highlights the importance of New Literacy Studies, advocated by Street (1984, 2000) and Barton et al. (2000), which emphasize literacy practices in diverse social and cultural contexts, crucial to meeting the linguistic and communicative needs of minority groups. Incorporating sign language could increase deaf students’ motivation to acquire English as L3 through visual learning, language transfer, cultural connection, multimodal learning, and student engagement. Wauters and Knoors (2008) found that integrating sign language into English language instruction improved the comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, and overall language skills of deaf students. Our research explores whether American Sign Language (ASL) could be a motivational resource for these students. The study involved observing six lessons in two classes of a regular inclusive school with deaf students, collecting questionnaire responses, and analyzing discourse sequences provided in interviews. Following an intervention in the language laboratory of the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), where English classes were taught in Libras, interviews revealed that the combination of Libras, ASL, and English significantly increased students’ interest and motivation to learn English.

A self-concept measure was administered to a group of 68 deaf students aged 8-19 years and a comparison group of 68 hearing students. Teachers for both of the groups completed observer reports of self-concept. Although tentative, the findings indicate that hearing teachers' perceptions of students' self-concepts are in closer agreement for hearing students than they are for deaf students. At the same time, the results show that deaf students do not appear markedly different from hearing students in their own reports of self-concept.

Language is an essential component of normal development and a means for discovering the world. As we have seen, however, deaf children frequently do not have full access to communication until they have passed the most important ages for language acquisition. Parents and educators of young deaf students thus often struggle to find a balance between fostering effective early communication skills, which research has shown is usually best achieved through sign language, and the provision of English skills needed for literacy and academic success. Despite decades of concerted effort, most deaf children progress at only a fraction of the rate of hearing peers in learning to read. Current data indicate that, on average, 18-year-old deaf students leaving high school have reached only a fourth to sixth grade level in reading skills. Only about 3 percent of those 18 year olds read at the same level as the average 18- year-old hearing reader, and more than 30 percent of deaf students leave school functionally illiterate (Traxler, 2000; Kelly, 1995; Waters & Doehring, 1990). At the same time, there are clearly many deaf adults and children who are excellent readers and excellent writers. How can we account for these differences? What are the implications for educators developing English curricula for deaf students? To answer these questions, we first need to consider what is meant by literacy—that is, what is it we are asking students to acquire? Then, we have to understand how deaf students read, at both descriptive and procedural levels. In this chap ter, we consider only literacy relating to print materials (reading and writing); other possibilities will be considered in chapter 9. But is the question whether deaf students read well enough to fulfill the needs and expectations of their teachers? Is it important to know how well various subgroups of deaf learners read compared to each other? Or, do we want to know how well deaf students read, as a group, compared to hearing students of the same age?

Background: Deafness is a condition when a person cannot hear, either partially or completely. Deaf students have different ways of communicating with other people, including the way they learn things. Teachers need to use special methods in teaching deaf students so that the objectives of the teaching and learning process can be achieved. This research aims to identify the strategies used by teachers in teaching English to deaf students and find out how these strategies are implemented. Methods: This research uses a qualitative descriptive method and is based on a case study at SMPLB Karya Bakti Don Bosco Wonosobo (Special School for the Deaf). To find answers to these problems, this study interviewed an English teacher about the strategies implemented during the learning process in the classroom. To obtain more in-depth data, researchers also conducted classroom observations. Findings: This research shows that teachers use sign language strategies, read lips and use various media. As for the implementation of this strategy, the teacher focuses more on enriching students' vocabulary, the teacher speaks slowly and clearly when using sign language. teachers teach simple conversations; teachers use varied media. Conclusion: Teaching English to deaf students requires tailored strategies such as sign language, lip-reading, and media use, which must be implemented with patience and persistence to support effective learning. Novelty/Originality of this article: The findings in this study emphasize the fact that teaching deaf students requires excessive effort and great persistence, and the strategies presented in this study can be useful for other English teachers teaching deaf students.

This research aimed to analyze the role of sign language in the process of teaching and learning mathematics by deaf students in the negotiation of meanings and construction of concepts. Educational Design Research was used as the research method, and the second phase of the design/construction is specifically presented here, in which interviews were conducted with Mathematics teachers, Libras translators and interpreters, parents and deaf students from state public schools in a municipality in the state of Paraná. The data was analyzed using Content Analysis. The results highlight the need for attention to be paid to the teaching of mathematics in deaf education, so that its foundations should be based on an understanding of sign language as a means of learning, valuing deaf culture and visual experiences in the classroom.

The authors’ aim is to describe the workshops developed to test the use of an authorship program that allows the simultaneous use of sign language and alphabetical writing. The workshops were prepared and conducted by a Computer Science undergraduate, with the support of the Program of Students’ Integration and Mediation (Programa de Integração e Mediação do Acadêmico – PIMA) at the University of Caxias do Sul. Two sign language interpreters, two deaf students and one hearing student, who also teach at a special school for the deaf, participated in the workshops. The main characteristics of the software and the development of the workshops are presented with examples of educational projects created during their development. Possible improvements are also outlined.KeywordsComputerized learning environmentauthorship softwaredeafnesssign languagealphabetical writing