Teaching Deaf Students to Read

Strategies for Teaching Deaf Students to Read

Strategies for teaching Deaf Students to Read
Introduction
“Deaf children read, on the average, at the fourth grade level when they graduate from high school.” ("Why shared reading?", 2000, p. 1) This statistic is both troubling and predictable. It is troubling, because Deaf persons have an intellectual ability range similar to their hearing peers. It is predictable because according to Gail Brand, American Sign Language instructor at Northwest Indian College, Deaf culture doesn’t understand “Hearing” nuances of English language that include idioms and metaphors. “Signers” of ASL communicate with a great deal of clarifying contextual clues.
Problems with language usage and comprehension of abstract topics can occur when teaching Deaf students to read. (Smith, Polloway, Patton, & Dowdy, 1998) Marie Clay identified four cues that strategic Hearing readers use: meaning, visual, letter sounds and language structure. ...