Importance of Language on Literacy Development of Deaf Child

A relationship between language and text needs to be established to become literate. What specific challenges may deaf children face in forming this relationship? How may such skills be developed in deaf children?
As there is an increasing number of deaf children being identified and amplified at an earlier age and with the quality of this amplification improving, the expectation that these children develop at a similar rate academically to their hearing peers has become more explicit. Sadly, this is not always the case. In this essay, I will be focusing on the challenges deaf children face when obtaining literacy skills and how the relationship between language and text can be developed.

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Being literate is much more than the ability to decode print into words. Connie Mayer (2007) stated that “Writing systems have evolved to encode spoken language, and even the one major system that has appeared to be an exception, Chinese, turns out to be a more complex case, based generally on spoken language morphology and phonology.” This means that to become literate, an individual most first have access to the language that is being decoded, which for some deaf children is one of the first obstacles they will face in the development of their literacy skills. There is a vast amount of research available that discusses how children’s abilities to learn reading and writing is influenced by their early experiences in life.
Goberis et al. (2012) investigated the complex language of hearing, hard of hearing and deaf children using a pragmatics check list. They discovered that a hearing child acquires the ability to use complex language, including basic syntax and age appropriate vocabulary in socially appropriate situations between the age of 3 and 4 years old. Sadly deaf and hard of hearing children acquired these skills much later in life, even when strategies had been put in place and these then cause challenges in writing and abstract conversational dialogue.
Swanwick and Watson (2007) looked at how book sharing can positively impact a deaf child’s literacy and language development and noted that both oral and signed parents created a shared interaction that allowed for sharing meaning and attention between parent and child in a physical setting that allowed for closeness. When parents are using BSL to share stories, the child is often placed opposite the adult to ensure they can see the signs, where hearing and oral story tellers usually sit adjacent to one another, which allows for a better listening position. Swanwick and Watson observed that parents using oral English tended to stick to the written story and explored the vocabulary and sounds through turn taking and interacting, where the parents using BSL did not always follow the text and retold the story using their own signs without using voice or lip patterns. Their focus was to share the actual story rather than sharing the written text and the parents were ensuring children understood the story cognitively by asking the children to repeat the signs used. Parents who used oral English emphasised the actual written text and thus focussed on the active listening skills of the child, which means the focus was on the literacy and language skills, instead of the story. This study shows that the parents of these children had a view and approach towards their child’s literacy development but were not always focussing on all aspects when sharing a text. However, it is important to note that the parents involved in this study were all very involved in their child’s early literacy development and results might have been different if the participants came from a background where oral retelling took priority over sharing written text or households where parents do not recognise the potential value of children’s picture books. As a teacher of the deaf, it is crucial to support and encourage parents to discuss a range of linguistic skills including pragmatics, syntax, graphophonical knowledge and semantics but most importantly to encourage a love of reading by repeating favourite books, which Sulzby (1993) stated builds a rich vocabulary and by singing nursery rhymes and clapping games with repeated patterns to further develop early language skills or to attend reading and story activity groups at a local library or play group.
There is plenty of research that shows that shared reading or interactive story book reading has a huge impact on children’s early literacy development and show the benefits of these social interactions around stories and text, allowing the child to understand that text and language are connected. (Yaden, Smolkin, & Conlon, 1989) Frequent and effective shared reading during the first 6 years of a child’s life aids the development of vocabulary, labelling, and oral and written abilties. Crain-Thorensen, Dahlin and Powell (2001) also proved that parents and caregivers use more complex language when book sharing and thus children get the opportunity to be exposed to new vocabulary which they might not encounter in their day to day life.
Justice et al. (2005) conducted a study regarding parents sharing books with hearing and deaf children and concluded that storybooks can provide a wealth of new vocabulary for children. She noted that deaf children responded less to implicit questions than hearing children and showed that parental scaffolding was a key element in word recall for deaf children, where joint attention was more important for hearing children. This shows that the parents of deaf children had to ensure they were building on their children’s prior knowledge to ensure they understood the language and vocabulary in the story told. She concluded that shared reading, retelling and discussing stories are paramount for early reading development. When sharing a book, the opportunity should be used to take turns discussing vocabulary, events and characters in the book and ensuring that both explicit and implicit questions are asked, suitable to the child’s current abilities.
The First Steps “Viewing Map of Development” shows that literacy acquisition is a linear process that develops a child’s use of texts, understanding of the context, understanding of conventions and development of the use of a range of strategies to extract meaning from print. Williams (2004) mentions that deaf children progress at a similar level as hearing children in their development of early reading and writing, however several cases studies, such as Traxler (2000) and Marschark, Lang & Alertini (2002) showed that a high percentage of deaf children graduated with a considerably lower literacy ability than their hearing peer, suggesting that their learning trajectories later changed drastically. One must consider, though, that recent advances in audiological equipment and management might show different results in more recent longitudal studies.
Reading requires a combination of several complex skills. Adams (2001) stated that to learn to read one must be have a context processor to be able to interpret the text, a semantic processor to understand the meaning of words, an orthographic processor to be able to recognise and identify the letters and spellings and a phonological processor to identify the speech sounds, which requires adequate audiological amplification or access to other abilities such as cued speech.
When it comes to emergent reading, one of the first skills a child must master is recognizing the letters of the alphabets and knowing that these letters are linked to 44 sounds in the English language, which then in turn can be put together to form words. Hearing children and those with early adequate amplification will begin to recognize certain letters and sounds in their own names and some keywords they might have been taught through rhymes or songs.
To aid this early process, the child should be encouraged to say the phonemes in the word and then repeat them to see if they can hear which word it makes. It sometimes helps if the adult repeats the sounds so the child can focus on hearing the word. Another strategy is finding familiar letter patterns in words to aid with blending, such as cat, pat, mat, sat. This could also be turned into a little game where the initial sound is changed to see how many real and nonsense words can be made. Kyle and Harris (2011) noted that hard of hearing and deaf children cannot hear all these sounds, despite using audiological equipment and thus other strategies are needed to support them. Visual phonics is one of the strategies that can be used to help deaf and hard of hearing children to learn phonics by combining handcues and written symbols to aid phonetic awareness and decoding skills. Shared reading has also been shown to aid the development of phonological awareness in both hearing and deaf children, especially where parents take the time to point out sounds children are familiar with and getting them to recall and blend familiar sound patterns.
Once the initial recognition of print and understanding of the alphabet and their related sounds has been formed, the child should, through frequent exposure to written words in signs, shared books, labels, etc,. be able to recall an increasing number of high frequency words and words that can be blended phonologically. The focus of reading activities then shift towards understanding that text carries meaning, rather than simply reading word for word. Reading books for the children at this skill level generally have smaller print and more complex sentence structures and fewer illustrations.
Kyle and Harris (2010) conducted a longitudal study to investigate reading and spelling abilities of emergent deaf children. They found out that at first, deaf children applied a whole word strategy to reading, however after 2 years of learning they were using a more alphabetic reading strategy based on phonological representations derived from speech reading skills. However, hearing children applied this alphabetic ability based on speechreading from the first year of reading, hence different reading strategies were applied by hearing and deaf children. This made them conclude that “If the information derived through speechreading is incorporated into underlying phonological representations, which in turn are used to support the phonological judgments required to complete phonological awareness tasks, then it is plausible that speechreading could be a strong initial predictor of reading in both deaf and hearing. In addition, for the deaf children, speechreading could essentially act as a marker or proxy for the quality of the underlying phonological representations” (Kyle and Harris, 2010, p.14) Unfortunately, the deaf and hearing children in this study were picked by their class teachers and thus their reading abilities were not always as closely matched as initially intended.
In a study by Bouton et al. (2011) it was discovered that children with cochlear implants greatly benefited from learning cued speech. Cued speech shows a hearing child hand movements near the mouth to clarify lip and mouth movements so they can have a visual aid to better grasp lip reading. Bourton et al. found that cued speech improved the CI children’s performance in reading tasks and phonetical awareness, compared to CI children who had not been exposed to cued speech. Additional research into the link between cued speech and phonetical awareness, spelling and reading abilities is required, however it does show that offering a CI child additional support through cued speech can have a positive impact on their language and literacy development.
Once children have mastered the word attack skills they are then faced by longer and more complex texts which require a greater understanding of the world and fewer illustrations as prompts. At this stage, young readers will need to comprehend a huge variety of phrases and clauses to understand the meaning of the text and recognising that text can come in a variety of different genres and serve different purposes.
To support deaf children’s understanding, it is important that as a teacher of the deaf, a variety of strategies are offered to ensure the child fully understand the texts they are working with. These strategies include giving the child the opportunity to retell the story in his/her own words, sequencing key elements of the text, discussing characters and settings and ensuring the child understand the vocabulary by clarifying and offering synonyms or visual representations. The child should be given the opportunity to ask and answer questions and to predict what might happen next. Another strategy is linking the key elements of the story with their own personal experiences or other stories familiar to the child, to allow the child to expand and comment on what has been read.
Once the child becomes a fluent reader, the focus shifts from being able to read to understanding the text and utilising it for further personal development. With this also comes the realisation that reading have a multitude of functions, such as reading for pleasure, deriving information, receiving instructions and interacting with a multitude of devices and multimedia platforms. Sadly, the transition from emergent to fluent reader does not always happen as smoothly as desired for deaf children. Geers and Hayes (2011) conducted a study with early implanted deaf adolescents to see if they managed to keep their academic trajectory in literacy skills at a consistent level with their hearing peers and to investigate to what degree the child’s phonological skills and family characteristics influenced their literacy development. Geers and Hayes discovered that early implanted children who were classed as age related in their phonological awareness in preschool, managed to make age appropriate progress compared to their hearing peers as adolescents with good audiological management and family support, however they did not perform as well on spelling and expository writing and they discovered that the development of phonological awareness is crucial to literacy success. Due to an increasing number of children being implanted prior to 12 months of age thanks to the Infant Screening Programme, it would be interesting to repeat this study with a cohort that was implanted sooner in life.
Being literate does not simply comprise of being able to read print. Reading and writing have often been said to go hand in hand and develop linearly. Mayer (2010) noted that there has been considerably little research in the implications of deafness on writing development and most of the research that has been published focusses primarily on spelling rather than writing composition. It is clear that children learn that writing carries meaning and that it is a useful tool for communication. There is debate about the multitude of strategies available for teaching reading and writing, for example phonological approaches or visual orthographic strategies. Simply learning how to spell words is not sufficient to become literate. The English language has a complex system of syntax and grammar. Cormier et al (2012) investigated the impact of age of acquisition of a signed language on grammatical abilities in deaf children. He noted that successfully acquiring a language, signed or oral, is crucial to developing grammatical awareness of that language and successfully acquiring a second language, i.e. BSL or English depending on L1. Grosjean (2001) also commented that bilingual education is a deaf child’s best chance of acquiring good literacy skills in both signed and written/spoken languages, however it is important to note that it is the parents’ right to choose the preferred communication method for their child. Miller (2005) also found that elementary children were able to find meaning in sentences by using the meaning of the actual words in these sentences but lacked the ability to process syntactic information. These studies show that a greater focus needs to be on the acquisition of grammatical awareness and syntax to ensure that deaf children get a greater understanding of the complex language structures in written texts. Further developing a child’s spoken language will aid their abilities to produce more complex written sentences and therefor reduce the amount of ‘baked sentences’, e.g. using the same sentence starters over and over again such as ‘I like’ or ‘I can’.
To ensure an adequate support programme is put in place for the deaf child, it is paramount that the teacher of the deaf thoroughly assesses the current reading and writing skills and language abilities, both receptive and expressive, of the child and has a good understanding of the support the child receives at home and in the class room. The child’s specific characteristics, attitudes to learning, preferred learning styles and personal, social and emotional development and their strengths and weaknesses are all crucial in a whole child approach towards progress.
The teacher of the deaf should work together with parents, schools and other agencies to ensure the best strategies are put in place for the child. Goberis et al. (2012) suggested that parents should target specific language skills at home using natural, day to day opportunities and the teachers should be given strategies to practise in the class room environment. It must be stressed that speech intelligibility does not give a clear picture of the child’s actual language abilities and time should be spend finding out where the strengths and weaknesses lay, especially when it comes to pragmatic language skills, grammar and vocabulary. Some of the strategies to put in place to further develop language could be following instructions and then allowing the child the opportunity to give instructions too to further develop the child’s theory of mind. The child should be encouraged to provide instructions that are clear and have sufficient information for the other person to follow. This could be scaffolded by adding picutres at first so the child can have a visual representation prior to building the sentences. Playing playground games or very easy board games are a great way to develop instructional language as a set of rules must be followed to be successful. The child could also be encouraged to explain the game to a peer with the help of an adult. Goberis et al. (2012) also states that it is important to encourage deaf children to answer ‘why’ questions and ask them to consider options or discussing cause and effect of certain behaviours. They must also develop the recognition that other children might have a different point of view and talkinga bout other children’s likes and dislikes will allow them to further develop their pragmatic skills and allows them to develop their theory of mind. Categorization is also an important step in language development. Playing sorting games or guessing games can help the child build these categories in their minds. It is also important for them to learn that not all statements are true and they must consider whether the information given to them is factual or not.
References:
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