Literacy And Deaf Education

"This contributed volume provides a global view of recent theoretical and applied research that focuses on literacy education for deaf learners"--

This compelling collection advocates for an alternative view of deaf people's literacy, one that emphasizes recent shifts in Deaf cultural identity rather than a student's past educational context as determined by the dominant hearing society. Divided into two parts, the book opens with four chapters by leading scholars Tom Humphries, Claire Ramsey, Susan Burch, and volume editor Brenda Jo Brueggemann. These scholars use diverse disciplines to reveal how schools where deaf children are taught are the product of ideologies about teaching, about how deaf children learn, and about the relationship of ASL and English. Part Two features works by Elizabeth Engen and Trygg Engen; Tane Akamatsu and Ester Cole; Lillian Buffalo Tompkins; Sherman Wilcox and BoMee Corwin; and Kathleen M. Wood. The five chapters contributed by these noteworthy researchers offer various views on multicultural and bilingual literacy instruction for deaf students. Subjects range from a study of literacy in Norway, where Norwegian Sign Language recently became the first language of instruction for deaf pupils, to the difficulties faced by deaf immigrant and refugee children who confront institutional and cultural clashes. Other topics include the experiences of deaf adults who became bilingual in ASL and English, and the interaction of the pathological versus the cultural view of deafness. The final study examines literacy among Deaf college undergraduates as a way of determining how the current social institution of literacy translates for Deaf adults and how literacy can be extended to deaf people beyond the age of 20.

"The Oxford Handbook on Deaf Studies Series began in 2010 with it first volume. The series presents state-of-the art information across an array of topics pertinent to deaf individuals and deaf learners, such as cognition, neuroscience, attention, memory, learning, and language. The present handbook, The Oxford Handbook on Deaf Studies in Literacy, is the 5th in this series, rounding out the topics with the most up-to-date information on literacy learning among deaf and hard of hearing learners (DHH)"--

Connie Mayer and Beverly J. Trezek provide an in-depth, evidence-based description of how young deaf children learn to read and write. They also set out a model of literacy development that makes clear links between theory and practice.

Most students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) struggle with acquiring literacy skills, some as a direct result of their hearing loss, some because they are receiving insufficient modifications to access the general education curriculum, and some because they have additional learning challenges necessitating significant program modifications. Additionally, instructional practices for DHH students tend to be directed toward two sub-populations of DHH students: those with useable access to sound and those without. Literacy Instruction for Students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing describes current, evidence-based practices in teaching literacy for DHH students and provides practitioners and parents with a process for determining whether a practice is or is not "evidence-based." Easterbrooks and Beals-Alvarez describe the importance of the assessment process in providing on-going progress monitoring to document students' literacy growth as a primary means to direct the course of instruction. They address the five key areas of instruction identified by the National Reading Panel: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In this concise guidebook, the authors present the role of assessment in the literacy process, an overview of evidence-based practices, and in the absence of such information, those practices supported by causal factors across the National Reading Panel's five areas of literacy. They also review the evidence base related to writing instruction, present case studies that reflect the diversity within the DHH population, and review the challenges yet to be addressed in deaf education.

A significant number of d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) children and adolescents experience challenges in acquiring a functional level of English language and literacy skills in the United States (and elsewhere). To provide an understanding of this issue, this book explores the theoretical underpinnings and synthesizes major research findings. It also covers critical controversial areas such as the use of assistive hearing devices, language, and literacy assessments, and inclusion. Although the targeted population is children and adolescents who are d/Dhh, contributors found it necessary to apply our understanding of the development of English in other populations of struggling readers and writers such as children with language or literacy disabilities and those for whom English is not the home language. Collectively, this information should assist scholars in conducting further research and enable educators to develop general instructional guidelines and strategies to improve the language and literacy levels of d/Dhh students. It is clear that there is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ concept, but, rather, research and instruction should be differentiated to meet the needs of d/Dhh students. It is our hope that this book stimulates further theorizing and research and, most importantly, offers evidence- and reason-based practices for improving language and literacy abilities of d/Dhh students.

"This contributed volume provides a global view of recent theoretical and applied research that focuses on literacy education for deaf learners"--

Humans’ development of literacy has been a recent focus of intense research from the reading, cognitive, and neuroscience fields. But for individuals who are deaf—who rely greatly on their visual skills for language and learning—the findings don’t necessarily apply, leaving theoretical and practical gaps in approaches to their education. Assessing Literacy in Deaf Individuals: Neurocognitive Measurement and Predictors narrows these gaps by introducing the VL2 Toolkit, a comprehensive test battery for assessing the academic skills and cognitive functioning of deaf persons who use sign language. Skills measured include executive functioning, memory, reading, visuospatial ability, writing fluency, math, and expressive and receptive language. Comprehensive data are provided for each, with discussion of validity and reliability issues as well as ethical and legal questions involved in the study. And background chapters explain how the Toolkit was compiled, describing the procedures of the study, its rationale, and salient characteristics of its participants. This notable book: Describes each Toolkit instrument and the psychometric properties it measures. Presents detailed findings on test measures and relationships between skills. Discusses issues and challenges relating to visual representations of English, including fingerspelling and lipreading. Features a factor analysis of the Toolkit measures to identify underlying cognitive structures in deaf learners. Reviews trends in American Sign Language assessment. Assessing Literacy in Deaf Individuals is an essential reference for researchers, graduate students, clinicians, and other professionals working in the field of deafness and deaf education across in such areas as clinical child and school psychology, audiology, and linguistics.