Abstract
Deaf children can develop reading skills by using a visual language to bridge meaning to English print without the use of English auditory phonology. To this end, five deafcentric frameworks are described that take into account the use of visual language and visual learning, as well as the use of deaf cultural role models in the teaching of reading. Moving away from the deficit model, these frameworks focus on Deaf1 students in the act of reading in order to document their actual behaviors using a bilingual American Sign Language/English philosophy. These five models suggest that there is more involved in reading than simply bottom-up code-based strategies based on spoken language. Multiple pathways are recommended, based on the work of Treisman, and his idea of “fault tolerant” approaches, which permit and encourage multiple pathways for deaf readers.
Highlights
A deaf doctoral student commented, “How many more English tests do hearing people have to give deaf children before they know deaf students have English deficiencies? Don’t we already know this?” Conventional reading research in deaf education has taken the stance of a deficit approach, as it repeatedly catalogues the deficits in English phonological, vocabulary, and syntax typically found with deaf readers
Given that there are multiple pathways which can lead to successful reading for deaf bilinguals (Allen, Letteri, Choi, & Dang, 2014; Andrews & Mason, 1986; Freel et al, 2011), we conclude this line of reasoning with a challenge to develop fault tolerant approaches that explore, permit, and encourage multiple pathways for all deaf readers to become successful
A view articulated by Paul (2013), as well as Trezek and Mayer (2015), labeled the Qualitative Similarity Hypotheses (QSH), is that deaf children go through the same process as their hearing peers in learning to read, even if they are delayed in their reading milestones
Summary
A deaf doctoral student commented, “How many more English tests do hearing people have to give deaf children before they know deaf students have English deficiencies? Don’t we already know this?” Conventional reading research in deaf education has taken the stance of a deficit approach, as it repeatedly catalogues the deficits in English phonological, vocabulary, and syntax typically found with deaf readers. Given that there are multiple pathways which can lead to successful reading for deaf bilinguals (Allen, Letteri, Choi, & Dang, 2014; Andrews & Mason, 1986; Freel et al, 2011), we conclude this line of reasoning with a challenge to develop fault tolerant approaches that explore, permit, and encourage multiple pathways for all deaf readers to become successful. Classroom observations and research on deaf readers find that even young deaf children, with limited proficiencies in both American Sign Language (ASL) and English, when learning to read take advantage of signing and fingerspelling (Andrews & Mason, 1986; Andrews, 2012) These findings are in contrast to traditional approaches to early reading instruction and frameworks that have been designed for deaf students. Visual processing strategies focus on visual learning, where learning is processed through the eye and can include visual engagement strategies such as visual attention, gaze behaviors, visual joint attention (see reviews in Baker, 2011; Hirshorn, 2011; Lieberman, Hatrak, & Mayberry, 2011), as well as the use of pictures, illustration, drawings, print, movies, and visual media (Kuntze, Golos, & Enns, 2014)
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