Abstract
Work in literacy education over the past two decades has radically shifted the notion of literacy, broadening it to include the ability to engage with compositions in various media (e.g., not only traditional texts like books and articles but also vlogs, blogs, graphic novels etc.). The notion that literacy can apply to non-written compositions has led some to wonder about the development of “reading comprehension” of texts in languages like American Sign Language (ASL) that do not have a written form. However, there are no existing assessments of ASL text comprehension. In this paper, we introduce the ASL-CMP, a new assessment tool to measure American Sign Language (ASL) text comprehension ability in deaf children. We first administered the task to a group of deaf children with deaf parents (n = 105, ages 8-18 years) in order to evaluate the reliability and validity of the task, and to develop norms. We found that the ASL-CMP has acceptable levels of internal consistency, difficulty, and discriminability. Next, we administered the task to an additional group of deaf children with hearing parents (n = 198, ages 8-18 years), and found that the ASL-CMP is sensitive to expected patterns: older children have better ASL text comprehension skills, literal questions are generally easier to answer than inferential questions, and children with early exposure to ASL generally outperform those with delayed exposure. We conclude that the ASL-text comprehension task is reliable and valid and can be used to characterize comprehension skills in ASL in deaf children ages 8-12.
Highlights
Reading comprehension—the ability to extract meaning from a text, to evaluate that information, to draw inferences, and to make connections to outside information—is an essential skill for classroom learning, as well as for later academic, social, and occupational achievement (Duke and Pearson, 2002; Shanahan, 2005; Van den Broek and Espin, 2012; Ciullo et al, 2016)
We present a new assessment of American Sign Language (ASL) text comprehension called the ASL Text Comprehension task (ASL-CMP)
Our findings suggest that the American Sign Language Text Comprehension Task (ASL-CMP) is sensitive enough to detect patterns that are expected based on existing reports of deaf children’s academic development, and is an appropriate measure of ASL text comprehension skills in children younger than 12 years of age
Summary
Reading comprehension—the ability to extract meaning from a text, to evaluate that information, to draw inferences, and to make connections to outside information—is an essential skill for classroom learning, as well as for later academic, social, and occupational achievement (Duke and Pearson, 2002; Shanahan, 2005; Van den Broek and Espin, 2012; Ciullo et al, 2016). In parallel with these expanded definitions of text and literacy, some began to consider compositions in sign languages as a form of text, and the ability to engage with these compositions as a form of literacy (Kuntze, 2004; Kuntze et al, 2014; Wall, 2014). We embrace this reimagining, and use it as a framework to examine the complex linguistic and cognitive skills involved in engaging with passages composed in American Sign Language (ASL), which we will refer to as ASL texts
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