Reading to Deaf Children Who Sing

Access Provided by UFSCAR-Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos at 10/31/12 10:21PM GMT

VOLUME 157, NO. 3, 2012 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF

307

Andrews, J. F. (2012). Reading to deaf children who sign: A response to Williams (2012) and suggestions for futureresearch. American Annals of the Deaf, 157(3), 307–319.

I N V I T E D E S S A Y

READING TO DEAF CHILDREN WHO SIGN: A RESPONSE TO WILLIAMS (2012) AND

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Keywords: prereading, emergentliteracy, signing deaf children, story -book reading, vocabulary, wordknowledge

In her invited essay on the promotionof vocabulary learning in young chil-dren with hearing loss (published inthe Winter 2012 issue of the Annals,Williams (2012) takes an optimisticstance, recommending that seven spe-cific classroom vocabulary interven-tions with storybook reading that havebeen used effectively with hearingchildren be adapted to meet the needsof deaf and hard of hearing children.Williams notes that these interven-tions, which she describes in her arti-

cle, have yielded gains in the vocabu-lary learning of hearing children. Eachintervention takes a whole languageapproach. It begins with a sharedbook-reading or read-aloud storybooksession led by the teacher. Companionactivities employ instruction that em-phasizes both meaning and code.These activities include storybookreading with dialogic or interactive ap-proaches (Lonigan & Whitehurst,1998); explicit vocabulary instruction(Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998); the useof props and language extension activ-ities (Wasik & Bond, 2001); embedded“rich instruction” of specific vocabulary(Beck & McKeown, 2007); extended in-struction of vocabulary before, during,

COMMENTARY on Williams’s (2012) invited article on the use of adaptedvocabulary learning interventions focuses on three areas: (a) Vocabu-lary interventions with storybook reading originally designed for hear-ing children can be adapted for deaf children. (b) Teachers are invitedto reflect on how the read-aloud process in English differs from theread-aloud process in sign. (b) Teachers are asked to consider addingdrawing and writing activities to reading lessons to show young deafreaders how reading and writing are reciprocal processes. The emer-gent literacy theory is used, as it informs and drives instructional vocab-ulary teaching practices for deaf children in preschool, kindergarten,and first grade. The emergent literacy theory broadly captures cognitive,social, perceptual, and linguistic understandings of how young signingdeaf children acquire both English word recognition abilities and vocab-ulary knowledge, among other important prereading concepts.

JEAN F. ANDREWS

ANDREWS IS A PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF

DEAF STUDIES/DEAF EDUCATION, LAMAR

UNIVERSITY, BEAUMONT, TX.

A

18294-AAD157.3_Summer2012 8/6/12 11:10 AM Page 307

and after the lesson (Coyne, Mc-Coach, & Kapp, 2007); “anchored in-struction” that focuses children’sattention on the phonological and or-thographic patterns in vocabulary (Sil-verman, 2007); and student retellings(Leung, 2008).Writing in the context of new and

recent developments such as the im-plementation of universal newbornhearing screening, the advances in au-ditory assistive technology such asdigital hearing aids and cochlear im-plants, and the fact that more deaf in-fants from birth to age 3 years areenrolled in early childhood programs(Sass-Lehrer, 2011), Williams pro-vides theoretical insight and practicalclassroom instructional interventionsaimed at developing English vocabu-lary with storybook reading for youngdeaf children in preschool, kinder-garten, and first grade.Williams uses two working hypothe-

ses to support her argument for vocab-ulary learning interventions. One is thesociocultural, socially mediated theoryof Rogoff (2003), described by Williamsas a process in which “young childrenacquire language through face-to-faceor through-the-air conversation as theyparticipate in a variety of sociocultur-ally situated activities that are rich inmeaning and coherent” (p. 502). Soci-ocultural theories related to early liter-acy have been related to children inother cultures, such as Hawaiian chil-dren (Au & Mason, 1983), children in afamily in urban Appalachia (Purcell-Gates, 1997), children in African-Amer-ican and White communities in NorthCarolina (Heath, 1983), and children inLatino communities (Garcia, 2000), aswell as to culturally Deaf children ofdeaf parents (Herbold, 2008).The second supporting hypothesis

Williams presents is the QualitativeSimilarity Hypothesis (QSH). Origi-nally developed by Paul and colleagues(Paul, 2010; Paul & Lee, 2010), the QSH

is based on the interactive-compensa-tory model of reading. Developed byStanovich (1984), the interactive-com-pensatory model is used to provide aframework for understanding deaf andhard of hearing children’s reading de-velopment, which is believed to pro-ceed more slowly but in the samesequence as hearing children’s readingdevelopment (Paul, 2010; Paul & Lee,2010). In addition to the QSH, Paulhas made other contributions to thevocabulary knowledge research base,starting with his 1984 dissertation onmultiple-meaning words, which hasbeen followed by numerous otherpublications on the vocabulary knowl-edge and vocabulary learning of deafstudents (see, e.g., Paul, 2001). In aneditorial in the issue of the Annals inwhich Williams’s invited essay ap-peared, citing his language experienceswith his son and his students, as well ashis vocabulary research, Paul reinforcesWilliams’s key points by underscoringthe importance of stimulating wordconsciousness, curiosity about words,and vocabulary knowledge in deaf stu-dents of all ages (Paul, 2012).On the basis of the social media-

tion theory (Rogoff, 2003) and theQSH (Paul, 2010; Paul & Lee, 2010),her own extensive work with deafchildren and reading, and her reviewof vocabulary interventions origi-nally designed for hearing students,Williams concludes that these inter-ventions could provide “a frameworkfor developing evidence-based in-structional interventions that can pro-mote vocabulary development inyoung children who are d/Deaf andhard of hearing” (p. 506). She arguesthat deaf children could benefit fromthese same interventions, and she laysout a research plan for replication.My commentary on Williams’s in-

vited essay addresses three areas. First,I respond to her recommendation ofthe use of adapted vocabulary instruc-

tional interventions, using my teachingexperiences and studies to expand onher notion of adaptation. Second, I in-vite teachers and researchers to reflecton the storybook read-aloud processfor signing deaf children and to thinkabout how it is similar and dissimilar tothis process as used with hearing chil-dren. Third, I suggest that teachers andresearchers consider adding drawingand writing to storybook read-aloudsessions to show deaf children the re-ciprocal relationship between readingand writing. This can be accomplishedeven with young deaf children at theemergent writing level, as their draw-ings and scribbles can support theiremergent literacy processes as well asactivate their imagination and creativ-ity (Mason, 1989; Teale & Sulzby, 1986).Finally, I recommend that in order toincrease understanding of children’sdevelopment of knowledge of words,both word recognition and vocabu-lary knowledge, additional longitudi-nal studies based on the emergentliteracy framework need to be done todocument how deaf children learnabout words through meaning-basedand code-based reading interventionsthat include storybook reading, draw-ing, and writing.As such, longitudinal studies using

whole stories can document how deafchildren map stories, sentences,words, and letters onto their sign lan-guage and fingerspelling if one sup-ports visual approaches (Allen et al.,2009; Goldin-Meadow, 2001; McQuar-rie, 2008; Nover & Andrews, 1998). Orif one’s orientation is to the speech-to-print match, to alternative visual“phonological” approaches such as Vi-sual Phonics or Cued Speech to printmatch (see reviews of these studies inTrezek, Wang, & Paul, 2010), or to acombination of both, all throughoutthis commentary I underscore the im-portance of reading researchers col-lecting data on reading behaviors of


308

A RESPONSE TO WILLIAMS (2012)


children reading whole stories, asWilliams suggests.Indeed, research with hearing chil-

dren has shown that reading wholestories is also one of the best ways toteach children how to read, as theyuse their background knowledge andprior experience to construct mean-ing by integrating perceptual andword knowledge in order to developreading comprehension skills, partic-ularly at the emergent literacy level, assuggested by Mason (1992). Isolatedcomponential subskills such as devel-oping letter knowledge by matchingthe alphabet to the manual hand-shape, matching an ASL handshapeto an ASL sign, matching a picture toa print word or a graphic depiction ofa sign, matching letters of the alpha-bet to sound symbol knowledge, andmatching phonemes to graphemesand sounds to words all have a placein assessment and instruction. But if these activities are presented out-side the context of whole stories, thisis not reading. Indeed, children aregiven a false sense of what reading is from these matching activities. Ineffect, they spend time “gettingready” to learn to read rather thanengage in the reading of stories fromthe start. Reading is then no longer a constructive process in which children are “behaving like readers”(Stallman & Pearson, 1990, p. 38),reading connected texts where theyare, but simply the recognition of let-ters and words in decontextualizedsettings.An expected response to the story-

book suggestion may be “If childrencannot read any words, how can theyread a whole storybook?” A reason-able counterresponse is that there aremany picture books available foremergent readers, with a wide rangeof connected language in them suchas high-frequency words and simplephrases and sentences.

Adapted InterventionsAshton-Warner and Organic TeachingWilliams’s recommendations for theuse of adapted interventions ring truewith my teaching experiences. My firstreading adaptation was taken fromthe book Teacher, written by the NewZealand reading educator and novelistSylvia Ashton-Warner (1963), whoworked with Maori children. Ashton-Warner asked her students, “Whatwords do you want?” She then pro-ceeded to give them the vocabularythey wanted to learn, word such aslove, fight, and kiss. I adapted Ashton-Warner’s intervention for teachingdeaf students their “favorite words”based on signs I saw them using. Tothis end, I copied graphic pictures ofsigns out of a sign language book andpasted the sign drawings with theirprinted English word equivalent alongwith a sample English sentence on psy-chedelic-colored poster board on theclassroom wall. Then, students stoodby the cards, picked out their “favoritesigns and words,” and then made upstories in sign language on the spot, us-ing these words to entertain their class-mates. It was a popular activity with thechildren, as they were using their signlanguage to read English.Ashton-Warner (1963) called her

theory “Organic Teaching.” Discour-aged by the low achievement of theMaori children, who were not suc-ceeding with British methods of learn-ing to read, she used the children’sMaori language and culture to build abridge to the English language andculture. While, like Ashton-Warner, Iwas discouraged by my students’ lowEnglish scores, I was encouraged bytheir rich discourse in sign language.Aston-Warner (1963) also had her

young students author their ownbooks from their language experi-ences. For this she has been called the“mother of the language experience”

approach; some have even creditedher with creating strategies that wereprecursors to the whole languagemovement and multicultural educa-tion (Thompson, 2000).In the early 1970s, one insight that

my reading colleagues at the MarylandSchool for the Deaf and I often dis-cussed in the teacher’s lounge wasthat if we could harness our students’sign language skills and use these skillsto hike up their English vocabulary,then we would be successful readingteachers. But I soon discovered thatmapping single signs to print was notenough. How words were arranged insentences—that is, the syntax or thegrammatical structure of words—hadto be considered. Vocabulary wordstypically do not occur in single-wordenvironments unless they are in thecontext of environmental print (e.g., astop sign) or are on a standardizedreading test! Indeed, the English lan-guage is largely shaped by word orderand the use of particles such as prepo-sitions and conjunctions, and if youchange the word order of a sentence,you change the meaning (Hitchings,2008). For instance, Hitchings uses anamusing example in the sentence“Fred ate ostrich.” The meaning ofthis sentence is dramatically differentfrom that of the sentence “Ostrich ateFred” (p. 9).

Adapting Syntax Reading and Language MaterialsThe difficulties deaf readers have withEnglish syntax was brought to my at-tention and to the forefront of deafeducation in the 1980s with StephenQuigley and colleagues’ syntax re-search (Quigley, Wilbur, Montanelli, &Steinkamp, 1976) based on the theo-ries of Noam Chomsky (1965) relatingto transformational grammar. Chom-sky described transformational gram-mar as a system of language analysisthat recognizes the relationships be-


309


tween words in a sentence and usesrules (transformations) to expressthese relationships.Quigley et al. (1976) analyzed basal

readers and found many complex Eng-lish structures that deaf children couldnot read. The work of Quigley et al. intransformational grammar and that ofPayne (1982) in verb particles refo-cused the deaf education field intogoing beyond the level of single vo-cabulary words in understanding deafchildren’s reading difficulties and exam-ining nine specific syntactic structuresand 64 verb particle combinations thatdeaf students had difficulty readingand writing. From multiple studies,Quigley and various colleagues devel-oped the Test of Syntactic Abilities, orTSA (Quigley et al., 1976), and the Testof Verb Particles (Payne, 1982), as wellas language materials for young deafstudents. On the basis of Quigley’s syn-tax research, Quigley, McAnally, Rose,and King (2001) wrote Reading Mile-stones, while Quigley, McAnally, Rose,and Payne (2003) developed Read-ing Bridge. These are two language-controlled basal reading programs thatare still widely used in schools and pro-grams for deaf children and for hearingchildren with reading disabilities.Another product of Quigley’s work

was Reading and Deafness (King &Quigley, 1985), the first textbook onreading and deafness based on linguis-tic and reading research. This bookpulled together not only Quigley andcolleagues’ insights about deaf stu-dents’ knowledge of reading, vocabu-lary, and grammar, but the work ofother reading scholars at the Centerfor the Study of Reading at the Univer-sity of Illinois.

The North Carolina Project:Storybook Reading andReciprocal TeachingMason’s work showed that while read-ing stories to children was found to

foster later reading achievement, sto-rybook reading was not enough. It re-quired coaching and support fromparents and teachers (Mason, 1992).Using this storybook reading concept,Andrews and Mason (1986a, 1986b)adapted an emergent literacy inter-vention from studies with hearingnursery school children that incorpo-rated teacher and parent book shar-ing and support (Mason, 1980, 1981).The purpose of this quasi-experimen-tal study was to measure the impact ofan adaptation of Mason’s interventioncalled “Little Books” on the promo-tion of emergent literacy skills inkindergarten and first-grade studentsat a state school for the deaf. Thetreatment consisted of 20 storybook-reading sessions at school conductedin Total Communication (signs andspeech) (Andrews & Mason, 1986a,1986b). Students’ progress was meas-ured with several pretests and post -tests adapted from measurementsused with hearing children in nurseryschool (Mason, 1980, 1981).In the study, which we called the

North Carolina project, we focused onweekly storybook reading using amodification of the reciprocal teach-ing procedure (Palinscar, 1984). In thereading lesson, the first step was mod-eling, in which the experimentersigned one of the storybooks to thechildren, focusing on meaning. Next,to help the children focus on themeaning of the story and the vocabu-lary, a discussion was conducted usingthree to five of the vocabulary wordstargeted for that session. Next, guidedreading took place, with each studentreading the story to the group. Lower-skilled students who had difficultywere supported by higher-skilled stu-dents. Supervised practice followed,with the children participating in jointreading activities such as readingbooks to peers, reciting the storyplots with the assistance of peers, and

acting out the stories. At the end ofthe session, the children were givencopies of the books to keep and takehome to read to their parents (An-drews & Mason, 1986a, 1986b).Even though the control group

showed slightly more knowledge atthe beginning of the study, the treat-ment group outperformed the controlgroup in the posttest phase on theoverall test of prereading print knowl-edge, thus showing the impact of the“Little Books” intervention program(Andrews & Mason, 1986a, 1986b). Wenot only found that the yearlong inter-vention jump-started vocabulary, butthat the children in the North Carolinaproject made gains in the acquisitionof print concepts, fingerspelling, bookreading, story reciting, and spelling(Andrews, 1988; Andrews & Mason,1984, 1986a, 1986b).

Expository Texts andMetacognitive and Word-Attack StrategiesAnother adapted intervention fromthe hearing reading literature that Ma-son and I experimented with (An-drews & Mason, 1991) was the use ofmetacognitive strategies based on thecognitive-interactive-perspective viewof reading (Anderson, 2000; L. Baker& Brown, 1984; Duffy, Roehler, & Ma-son, 1984).In a descriptive study (Andrews &

Mason, 1991), Mason and I comparedthe comprehension strategies of 15deaf and hearing students readingpassages from expository texts. Threegroups of students were tested: (a)deaf youths in high school (n = 5)reading at the 2nd-to-6th-grade levels,(b) hearing children in elementaryschool reading at grade level (n = 5),and (c) hearing high school youthswith reading disabilities (n = 5) whowere reading four grades below gradelevel. Individually, students were askedto read three expository passages in


310



which key words were missing. Weadapted a technique called protocolanalysis (Olshavsky, 1976–1977) andused a cloze procedure. We modifiedthis procedure by asking the studentsto explain how they chose their wordsto fill in the cloze blanks. Their self-re-ports were in the form of sign lan-guage for the deaf youths and verbalreports for the hearing youths.Examination of strategy type

showed that the hearing readers usedmore strategies than the deaf readers.Hearing readers made more use ofcontext clues and the title to figure outmeanings of words in the passages.The less able deaf readers were morelikely to simply re-read and use theirbackground knowledge to fill in thecloze passages, some of which did notalways help them find the right answer.We also documented how the deaf

readers were analyzing vocabularywords they did not know and howthey used their word attack skills. Themost skilled deaf reader (reading atthe sixth-grade level) used sound-re-coding strategies to a great extent. Hewould sign the text and use voice. Butbefore filling in the deleted part onthe cloze segment, he would silentlymouth all the words while he wasreading. But he also frequently usedsign-recoding strategies. The mostcommon strategy used by the deafreaders was fingerspelling. They wouldfingerspell words they did not know,thus using fingerspelling as a place-holder (Ewoldt, 1981). At other times,they would fingerspell a word theydid not know, pause and think, thengive the sign equivalent, thus showingthe experimenter that they under-stood the word. We also observed ourfive deaf readers to use graphemicstrategies. However, use of this wordattack strategy more often resulted inan incorrect response. For instance,the word there was signed THE, andfarther was signed FATHER. The bet-

ter-skilled deaf readers would oftengo back and self-correct, thus showingan ability to reconstruct the meaningof a sentence or paragraph based onsemantic knowledge. Deaf readersalso were observed using a combina-tion of strategies, which became ap-parent when they were readingcompound or multisyllabic words.For instance, the word wasteland wasread with two signs, WASTE andLAND. Frequently, students wouldbreak down a word using both signsand fingerspelling, thus showingmorphological awareness, as in FARM+ I-N-G.

Summaries and Reading FablesPeter Winograd, Gayle DeVille, and I(Andrews, Winograd, & DeVille, 1994)adapted another intervention basedon a cognitive, schema-directed ap-proach to comprehension instruction(Duffy et al., 1984). The purpose wasto build background knowledgeabout a text using previews or sum-maries presented in American SignLanguage (Andrews et al., 1994). Fac-tors such as prior experiences andbackground knowledge that readersbring to the text are considered criti-cal in helping them make sense ofwhat they are reading (Tierney & Cun-ningham, 1984), and we devised theASL summary to provide backgroundknowledge.Seven children from an elementary

department at a state school for thedeaf were the participants. Theyranged in ages from 11 to 12 years. Allwere prelingually deaf, with severeto profound hearing losses. Readingscores ranged from second to fifthgrade on the Stanford AchievementTest—Hearing Impaired Edition. Threegroups of hearing youths were used asa comparison group.We reviewed several techniques

that build background knowledge in

hearing readers (Tierney, Readance, &Dishner, 1985), then adapted one foruse with deaf students. Our tech-nique, called the ASL summary tech-nique, had four steps: (a) The teachersummarized a three-page fable andsigned it to a student in ASL; (b) thestudent read the printed English textof the fable from a book; (c) the stu-dent retold all he or she could re-member of the ASL summary andreading; and (d) the student re-flected, then told the researcher whathe or she thought the moral lesson ofthe fable was. The moral lesson foreach fable was neither explicitly statedin the printed text nor mentioned inthe ASL summary. Thus, this consti-tuted a true test of our intervention,as the student had to go beyond thefacts of the story and make inferencesto figure out the moral lesson of thefable.Each student read two fables in

each session. In the first session, eachstudent would read fable 1 and fable 2without the ASL intervention. In thesecond session, the students wouldread fable 3 with the ASL interventionand fable 4 without the intervention.In the third session, each studentwould read fable 5 with the interven-tion and fable 6 without the interven-tion. The fables were counterbalancedacross the participants. All sessionswere videotaped and transcribed intoEnglish. The means and the standarddeviations for the number of pausalunits retold on the four measureswere higher during the readings of fa-bles 3 and 5 with the ASL summary in-tervention. Compared to the hearingreaders, the deaf readers scored loweron the measure of telling the morallesson. This finding was expected be-cause the hearing readers had the ad-vantage of reading in their nativelanguage. While the data among deafreaders did not reach statistical signifi-cance on the moral lesson measure,


311


there were higher scores on storiesfor which the deaf reader received theASL summary intervention.

Storybook Reading for EnjoymentOur next adapted intervention tookthe form of an exploratory qualitativestudy at our speech and hearingclinic. Vickie Dionne and I (Andrews& Dionne, 2010) provided signingdeaf children with cochlear implantsmany opportunities for daily story-book reading for pleasure during a 4-week reading camp. Six deaf childrenages 5 to 8 years who were in ele-mentary school and had received acochlear implant after age 4 partici-pated in our camp. All were reading atthe kindergarten to first-grade level,with the exception of one boy whotested at the second-grade level, andall had received implants after age 4years (Andrews & Dionne, 2010).The goal of our study was to pro-

vide an enjoyable environment forchildren in which they could enjoyreading, writing, drawing, speaking,and listening freely using whateverlanguage or combinations of lan-guages they wanted—ASL, spokenEnglish, Signed English, or a mixtureof all three—in a supportive environ-ment. Our secondary goal was to doc-ument how often and in what contextsthe children code-switched and code-mixed the two languages—ASL andspoken and signed English. The read-ing camp focused on daily storybookreading of children’s literature as wellas looking at wordless picture books.We used a deaf native signer to pro-vide stories in ASL, and speech-lan-guage pathologists who knew nosigns to present the same stories inspoken English during the same day.Follow-up activities included discus-sion of concepts and vocabulary, relat-ing story events to the students’personal experiences, art and play ac-

tivities, karaoke signing (the mostpopular activity), and field trips to thecampus bookstore to use speech toorder ice cream and candy.We found that all the children

code-switched from ASL to speechand from speech to ASL, or from ASLto Simultaneous Communication orvice versa, often throughout the campdays, depending on the languageused by the children’s conversationalpartners. We also identified four levelsof code-switching ability among thechildren, from single words to sen-tences (Andrews & Dionne, 2010).Based on our 4 weeks of observa-

tions in the camp, we concluded thatthe contact linguistic insights ofPlaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez (2008)explained some of the language be-haviors of our students. Using an in-terdisciplinary approach including thefield of contact linguistics, Plaza-Pustand Morales-Lopez argue that deafchildren’s sign bilingualism shouldbe viewed in a positive vein. In otherwords, the two researchers studiedand conceptualized how the two lan-guages in two different modalities interact and form a cross-modal lan-guage mixing that could be viewed asa linguistic resource rather than de-viant language development.

Alabama Project: AdaptedLittle Book Intervention forSigning Deaf ChildrenIn a current emergent literacy study(the Alabama study), we are following25 signing deaf children longitudinallyover 14 months. The children are par-ticipating in 20 teacher/student sharedbook-reading sessions in school (over9 months) and 10 sessions at home (3months in the summer). While in theNorth Carolina emergent literacystudy the experimenter used TotalCommunication (Andrews & Mason,1986a, 1986b), in this new emergentliteracy study the teachers are using

ASL Discourse (ASL conversations andASL storytelling) (Rayman, 1999). Theinstructional materials include com-panion English-language picture-phrase books: “Big Books” (enlargedbooks) and “Little Books” (adaptedfrom McCormick & Mason, 1990). The20 books have been translated intoASL by a deaf mother or father andplaced on a DVD. The children viewthe digital storybook reading as wellas view the storybook reading by theteacher “live face to face.” The “LittleBook” program we are currentlyadapting has been used with morethan 400 hearing children in Illinoisand Newfoundland (McCormick &Mason, 1986; Philips, Norris, & Ma-son, 1996), and with deaf children inNorth Carolina (Andrews & Mason,1986a, 1986b), and has been found toshow positive gains in children’semergent literacy skills.Measures included a standardized

early literacy concept test, a set of ob-servational tasks, teacher and parentinterviews, and the collection of writ-ing samples. Children were also video-taped six times over the school year,and growth curve regression analyseswere done on their book-readingand book-reciting tasks. Relation-ships between child backgroundvariables and pretest/posttest scoreswere also examined. A longitudinal,pre-experimental, one-group pretest/posttest design was used.For our 6-month progress report,

on the period August–December 2011,we conducted a growth curve regres-sion analysis which showed that 25children progressed at an overall aver-age of 6.08% each month from Augustto December on the book-readingtasks, while there were, on average,4.09% increases each month in book-reciting learning. Data were inter-preted in the light of limited exposureto ASL. Of the 20 children who hadhearing parents, 16, or 80%, had had


312




313

3.5 years or less of ASL immersion atschool (Andrews, Gentry, & Jackson,2012). The Alabama study also aimsto address the complex and contro-versial issues of sign bilingualism(Grosjean, 2008, 2010) and second-language learning for deaf students(Nover & Andrews, 1998).To Williams’s list of adapted inter-

ventions, I add data-driven interven-tions such as shared book reading,the reciprocal teaching procedure,“think-aloud” and protocol analyses,the cloze procedure, building com-prehension with story summaries,providing storybook reading forpleasure, and during teacher story-book read-alouds in ASL followed bystudent shared book reading, storyreciting, and drawing and writing.Based on my observations of sign-

ing deaf children and youths, it appeared that they were thinkingabout, and talking about, texts usingtheir signs, fingerspelling, and insome instances speech and speech -reading. Thus, the cognitive-social in-teractive theories of reading in the1970s to the 1990s were useful in un-derstanding deaf children’s readingdevelopment.In the past 10 years, reading schol-

ars have shifted their attention fromstrategy instruction to student-to-stu-dent and teacher-to-student discourseabout texts during classroom literacylessons (see Anderson, 1995, cited inFlippo, 2012, p. 19). Reading re-searchers are now cautioning againsttoo much focus on strategy instruc-tion. For instance, Pearson under-scored that strategy instruction maynot be as effective as conventional dis-cussions in the reading classroom thatare based on content knowledge(cited in Flippo, 2012, p. 317). This isreiterated by Zang and Anderson,cited in Flippo (2012, p. 308), whohave said, “The most important posi-tive finding of the past decade is the

persuasive evidence about the impor-tance of stimulating classroom talk.”More research is needed to specify

procedures in vocabulary teachingembedded in storybook reading andthe development of classroom talkamong deaf children in the readingclassroom, whether they are monolin-gual users of oral English, bilingual/bimodal language users, or ASL/English bilingual language users. Giventhat many deaf students—old andyoung—often lack proficiency in signlanguage as well as oral English, it willbe a challenge for teachers to de-velop stimulating student-to-studentand teacher-to-student classroom talkabout texts.

Storybook Read-AloudsMy second point of this commentaryrelates to the popular practice ofteacher storybook read-alouds. (Par-ent storybook read-alouds are not included in this commentary.) A story-book read-aloud can be simply for enjoyment, or it can be used for in-structional purposes with explicitlearning objectives (Au, Mason, &Scheu, 1995). Essentially, the teacherselects a written text, such as a popu-lar storybook, and reads it aloud tochildren in the classroom.Reading aloud to children is con-

sidered so important that it receivedattention from the National Com -mission on Reading, which issued areport in the 1980s titled Becoming a Nation of Readers (Anderson,Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985).The report’s authors stated that “thesingle most important activity forbuilding the knowledge required foreventual success in reading is readingaloud to children” (p. 23). Further,they reported that the commissionhad found evidence to support theuse of reading aloud not only in thehome but in the classroom as well,adding that “it is a practice that should

continue throughout the grades” (p. 51).While the efficacy of having teach-

ers read to preschoolers in the class-room and having parents read tothem in the home has not been ac-cepted uncritically (see, e.g., a criticalreview by Scarborough & Dobrich,1994), such activity has nonethelessbeen recognized as a valuable tool forteachers and parents. For example,Dunning, Mason and Stewart (1994)have written,

The influence of shared book read-ing on children’s literacy achieve-ment has perhaps been overstated.Nevertheless, it is a valuable memberof a constellation of home literacy ex-periences, which influence school-related literacy achievement, and . . .merits further attention. (p. 337)

About the same time that the de-bate over shared book-reading wasoccurring among reading scholars, indeaf education we were having a simi-lar debate on the efficacy of storybookread-alouds for deaf children. We dis-cussed the differences between read-alouds for hearing children and thosefor deaf children with the teacherswho worked on the Star Schools proj-ect (1998–2002) in Santa Fe, NM.Stephen Nover, a sociolinguist, ledthe ASL/English Bilingual project (alsocalled the Star Schools or CAEBERproject, CAEBER being an acronymfor Center for American Sign Lan-guage and English Education andResearch). This was a major languageteaching reform movement designedto engage inservice and preserviceteachers by forming study groups thatwould read widely in the bilingual andliteracy theory and practice literature.Following their readings and reflec-tions on guided questions providedby the research team, the teachersmet regularly at their home schools



314


and again in groups of schools inSanta Fe at the New Mexico School forthe Deaf for discussion of how toadapt bilingual practices for use withdeaf children, using ASL and English(Nover & Andrews, 1998). One notionthat stimulated discussion was the useof the storybook read-aloud with deafstudents (see Nover & Andrews, 1998,pp. 60–65, for a complete descrip-tion). Readers interested in learningmore about the Star Schools projectcan access five reports at http://www.gallaudet.edu/CCS/LPI_and_CAEBER/Resources.html.Basing our discussion on our read-

ing of Trelease (1994) and Fountas andPinnell (1996), we talked about howread-alouds constituted a different ex-perience for hearing children than forsigning deaf children. For example, forhearing children, read-alouds can con-dition the child to associate readingwith pleasure. They can create back-ground knowledge, activate newschema, and reactivate old schema orways to mentally organize knowledge.They provide an adult reading rolemodel for English with correct phras-ing and fluency. They engage childrenin different aspects of book sharingand provide children with new book-reading experiences. Concepts aboutprint, vocabulary, and syntax; famil-iarity with different styles of authors;appreciation of different texts; andmotivation to read stories independ-ently are other benefits of read-alouds.They also help children develop asense of story and a knowledge of howtexts are structured, and expand theirlinguistic abilities. Read-alouds makescomplex ideas available to studentsand help promote oral language devel-opment. They can also serve as a basisfor follow-up writing activities (Foun-tas & Pinnell, 1996; Trelease, 1994).We also discussed how read-alouds

are not always easy for all hearing chil-dren. The pronunciation of syllable

structure in a particular dialect can bevery different than it is in booksprinted in American English. This mayconfuse children, especially if they areusing another dialect of English suchas Black English Vernacular or Ap-palachian English. In addition to ex-hibiting dialectal differences, spokenlanguage generally does not alwaysmirror print. Children may becomeconfused about the silent “e” form inwritten language. In words such asskated and walked, the sound “-ed” isproduced in different ways; that is, “-ed” makes a “t” sound in walked. Thepoint here is that English has pho-netic inconsistencies that are not al-ways accessible through written texts.On the basis of our reading of the

literature and our observations ofteachers in the classroom, we dis-cussed how read-alouds in ASL differsignificantly from read-alouds in Eng-lish with hearing children because thelatter tap into different linguistic re-sources.This is not to say that read-alouds

are not beneficial to deaf children (fora discussion of this issue, see, e.g., Ert-ing & Pfau, 1997; Hayes & Shaw, 1997;Livingston & Collins, 1994; Mather,1989; 1996; Schleper, 1997). They arebeneficial, but for other reasons re-lated to ASL learning.One difference is that storybook

read-alouds do not provide deaf stu-dents with the English role model ex-perienced by hearing children. Forinstance, English-text-to-ASL signingby teachers does not provide thephonological, semantic, morphemic,syntactic, and pragmatic aspects thatread-alouds in English provide hear-ing children. English is a linear andsequential language, while the gram-matical structures of ASL use move-ment and space as well as facialexpressions, raised eyebrows, headtilts, shoulder shifts, and mouthmovements to show grammatical

meaning (Valli & Lucas, 2000). And be-cause of these fundamental differ-ences between the two languages,teachers cannot assume that the “Eng-lish-text-to-ASL-signing strategy” willbe sufficient to teach reading skills todeaf children (Nover & Andrews,1998). The skilled teacher of readingmust make the necessary bridges be-tween the two languages, and this iswhere bilingual training in language-handling techniques comes in. (Inter-preters know these techniques anduse many of them in their work withdeaf consumers, but not necessarily inteaching reading.)In our Alabama Project group read-

ing sessions, we are observing teach-ers signing a story in ASL, thenreturning to an enlarged version ofthe storybook (Big Book) in Englishand fingerscanning the print (Gal-limore, 1999), explaining the Englishwords and phrases using ASL and fin-gerspelling and writing on the white-board. (According to Gallimore, 1999,when teachers fingerscan the print,this action signals to the deaf childthat a translation is about to take placefrom ASL to English.) Teachers are us-ing ASL as a semantic bridge, and ASL,fingerspelling, and writing as tools toanalyze English print (see also Nover& Andrews, 1998, p. 62). The teachersare using both languages to help thechild get meaning from English print.Instead of read-alouds, we suggest

the term storysigning for deaf chil-dren (Nover & Andrews, 1998). Thestorysigning function presents con-cepts, plot, characters, setting, andother elements of stories to deaf stu-dents in ASL (see, e.g., Bahan, 1992;Byrne, 1996; Mather, 1989, 1996).Through storysigning, the signer canmodel the use of books, which will in-crease the child’s interest in them(Schleper, 1997).For example, ASL storysigning con-

ditions the child to associate signing


with pleasure, not reading English.They increase the deaf students’ back-ground knowledge through ASL. Thisactivity provide a fluent ASL rolemodel. ASL storysigning engages chil-dren in different aspects of sharingstories through ASL. Further, it pro-vides children with ASL experiencesthey do not receive at home. ASL sto-rysigning allows children to developconcepts about ASL signs, expandtheir ASL vocabulary, learn about syn-tax, become familiar with signingstyles, develop appreciation of differ-ent types of ASL stories, and becomemotivated to sign stories themselves.ASL storysigning helps children un-derstand the purposes of storysign-ing. Children can develop a sense ofstory in ASL. Storysigning can alsohelp make complex ideas in ASL avail-able to the child. It can promote ASLdevelopment, and establish a lan-guage bridge by providing ideas inASL that children can link to anotherlanguage, such as English (Nover &Andrews, 1998).Storysigning can be provided for

enjoyment and concept developmentthrough ASL. However, if the purposeof storysigning is to teach Englishreading, then the teacher must leadthe child into reading the Englishequivalent text. The lesson must befollowed up with line-by-line explana-tions in how the English language ismeaningful.In our Alabama project, we have

observed the teachers using twokinds of read-alouds. One kind is forenjoyment. For instance, the kinder-garten teacher signed The HungryCaterpillar in ASL, and followed upthe reading with art activities. In thethird grade, the teacher read The NewKid From the Black Lagoon, a chapterbook. This book was signed in ASL,and the children viewed it for enjoy-ment. A rich discussion of the ideasand characters followed.

We are using storybooks for instruc-tional purposes in our Alabama pro-gram. The simple nature of the booksallows the teacher to go through eachbook line by line and explain the mean-ings of the vocabulary and of thephrase and sentence grammar. Theseare storybook read-alouds, or story -signing for instructional purposes,which children also enjoy.

Drawing and WritingMy third aim in the present article re-lates to storybook reading followedup with drawing and writing. Deafchildren’s reading and writing areparts of their language system that in-teract with and support each other.Studies of emergent writing have con-sistently reported on the interrela-tionships between writing andreading (Clay, 1975; Mason, 1989;Teale & Sulzby, 1986; Yaden & Tardi -buona, 2012). In the act of writing,children are thinking of ideas andcomposing. They are demonstratingwhat they know about print-relatedconcepts such as directing print fromleft to right, forming and sequencingletters, using capital letters and lower-case letters, and spelling words (Clay,1975). In addition, they are using theirthinking, creativity, and imagination(Kress, 1997).

The Deaf Child’s FirstVocabulary WordTypically, the first vocabulary worddeaf children attempt to read andwrite is their first name. In our currentAlabama study, in order to get to knowour 25 participants, we asked themduring the pretest in August to draw aself-portrait, fingerspell their name,write their name, write another name,and write a letter and a word. Thesewere prereading tasks we hadadapted from longitudinal studieswith hearing children in nurseryschool (Mason, 1980). When they

were given the freedom to draw,write, and sign back to us about them-selves, we were pulled in their per-sonal worlds. We also learned whatprint concepts they knew along theemergent literacy continuum.Because of privacy considerations,

only the writing of the children’snames can be described here. Of our5 pre-K and kindergarten children,only one could not fingerspell or printher name. When asked to write hername, she wrote a continuous andconnected line of wavy scribbles. Thischild also had a visual impairment,and was a transfer student from a pub-lic preschool. All the other preschool/kindergarten children not only couldwrite their names, they also beganthem with a capital letter when writ-ing them. Of our 8 children in firstgrade, all could print their name. Mostused a combination of capital and low-ercase letters. All 10 children in thesecond and third grades started theirnames with capital letters followed bylowercase letters. All 25 children weredemonstrating the genesis of vocabu-lary word learning in the finger-spelling and printing of their firstnames as labels for their self-portraits.Using fingerspelling and writing, theywere putting together letters to formthe English word, that is, their firstname.After the children drew their self-

portraits and labeled them with theirnames, we asked them to talk abouttheir pictures. Most of the children’sstories centered on family and friends.The children signed to us their inter-pretation of their drawings. One boypictured himself shooting basketballhoops. Another boy drew himself nextto a coop labeled “chicken” and toldus his father had a chicken farm. Agirl’s picture showed the inside of hermouth, where she had just lost atooth. Another girl drew herself nextto her favorite flower. Another girl


315


drew herself next to her playhouse,while another drew herself next to herpet dog. One girl drew herself with acrown on her head and dressed in along gown and labeled herself “KingWoman.” One of the boys drew him-self standing beside a goalpost hold-ing a football, with two friends shownnearby.We interpreted these drawings and

name labels as the beginning of sto-ries about the students’ identity, inter-ests, inner symbolic worlds, and earlyattempts to construct meaning(Kress, 1997). The children’s drawingsprovided the context for printing theirnames (Andrews et al., 2012).

Some Benefits of Drawing and WritingDrawing and writing allow the child toshow how he or she comprehendsmeaning from a story even at the emer-gent literacy level. We have addeddrawing and writing to our 20 story-book reading sessions. The drawingand writing events not only give chil-dren another opportunity to expressparts of their comprehension of thestorybook but an avenue to expresstheir enjoyment, imagination, and cre-ativity goals that every teacher wants tohelp them fulfill, even if they are notthe skills measurable by standardizedstate tests and state curricula!

SuggestionsBased on Williams’s invited essay andthe commentary by Paul (2012), I of-fer four suggestions.First, Williams’s seven vocabulary

interventions with storybook read-ings constitute potential studies thatcan be designed and tested with deafstudents.Second, longitudinal designs could

be used to explore developmentalpatterns of children’s growth inemergent and development literacy

(Yaden, Rowe, & McGillivray, 2000),particularly vocabulary learning, aswell as to identify word knowledgelevels (Mason, Herman, & Au 1990).Third, while multiparadigmatic sci-

ence is “desirable and should be per-mitted” that allows all paradigms tobe freely used to explore practicalproblems in deaf education (Paul &Moores, 2010, p. 427), researchersshould consider designing studiesthat specifically utilize the paradigmof “Deaf epistemology” (or Deaf waysof knowing) in the teaching of read-ing. Certainly, as Wang (2010) pointsout, “standard epistemologies” ofreading methods designed for hear-ing children do have a place in deafeducation reading instruction. My dis-cussion above of using adaptations fordeaf children that are originally de-signed for hearing students concurswith Wang’s point of view. However, Irecommend that the field broaden itstheoretical and practical lens to alsoinclude “deaf epistemologies” in read-ing instruction because this area rep-resents a virtually unexplored andfertile ground for future literacy re-search for deaf children.Fourth, proponents of the ASL/

English bilingual approach to teach-ing reading would benefit from devel-oping more rigorous descriptions andstrategies for code emphasis strate-gies using signing, fingerspelling (S. Baker, 2010; Ausbrooks-Rusher,Schimmel, & Edwards, 2012), andwriting. As such, these reading strate-gies use “indigenous practices of thedeaf community” (Humphries, 2004).Furthermore, lessons can be devel-oped that tap into other linguistic as-pects of ASL such as the use ofhandshapes (Crume, 2012) and hand-shape rhymes and stories (Smith & Ja-cobowitz, 2005; Snodden, 2011).However, one must keep in mind thatusing the linguistic features of ASL is

teaching ASL, not English reading.And for English reading instruction totake place, the skilled teacher of read-ing must make the appropriate strate-gies for bridging from ASL to Englishand English to ASL (Nover & Andrews,1998; Simms, Andrews & Smith, 2005).These ASL/English bilingual strategiesfor reading English need to be testedempirically with large groups of sign-ing deaf children. To measure thesestrategies effectively, valid and reliablemeasurement tools need to be devel-oped as well. We cannot assume thatsigning stories is sufficient to teachreading. But ASL discourse throughstorysigning can lay the conceptualgroundwork and allow for rich class-room discussions about how Englishtexts work if the appropriate follow-up English reading instruction is car-ried out.

Closing WordsMore research is needed to investi-gate alternative visual strategies forteaching reading to deaf children withcochlear implants using whole storiesrather than decontextualized picture,sound, and sign matching activities.While we do not have precise figures,there are many deaf children who,even with early infant cochlear im-plantation, the very best surgical out-comes, and the best parental andprofessional training and support, stilldo not develop spoken language andemergent literacy skills as hearingchildren do (Carden, 2008). Whendeaf children fail to thrive linguisti-cally in spoken language, they are in-troduced to sign language late in thelanguage acquisition process (pastage 4 years).Much as they struggle to learn to

speak, deaf children with cochlear im-plants also struggle to learn sign lan-guage, and this has an impact on theirfuture acquisition of sign language


316



(Emmorey, 2002; Mayberry, 1993,1998). In effect, in early childhood ed-ucation we are setting up “double-semilingual environments”1 wherechildren are developing neither spo-ken nor sign language at a rate theycould if language-rich (English andASL) environments were set up muchlike those enjoyed by hearing childrenand deaf children of deaf parents (An-drews, Logan, & Phelan, 2008).Clearly, signing deaf children with

or without cochlear implants are atrisk when it comes to learning to readand write, and are in need of multipleinnovative reading instructional tech-niques aimed at creating opportuni-ties for them to read, enjoy, anddiscuss connected English discourse.And Williams’s review of the literatureof adapted vocabulary instructioncombined with storybook reading,and Paul’s (2012) encouragement ofteachers to develop in all deaf chil-dren a deep curiosity about wordsand a sense of word consciousness,have provided the field with a freshplace to start.

Note1. The term double-semilingual refersto a child who has failed to developproficiency in both of two languages(C. Baker & Jones, 1998). He or shehas underdeveloped vocabulary andgrammar and cannot express ideasand feelings using either language.This term has received much criticismfrom bilingual researchers because itblames the victim (the child) for notacquiring language instead of blamingthe language-impoverished environ-ment the child is in (C. Baker & Jones,1998, p. 14).

ReferencesAllen, T., Clark, M. D., del Giudice, A., Koo, D.,

Lieberman, A., Mayberry, R., & Miller, P.(2009). Phonology and reading: A responseto Wang, Trezek, Luckner, and Paul. Ameri-can Annals of the Deaf, 154(4), 338–345.

Anderson, R. C. (2000). Role of reader’s schemain comprehension, learning, and memory.In R. Ruddell & N. Unrau (Eds.), Theoreticalmodels and processes of reading (5th ed.,pp. 594–606). Newark, DE: InternationalReading Association.

Anderson, R. C., Hiebert, E. H., Scott, J., &Wilkinson, L. (1985). Becoming a nation ofreaders. Washington, DC: National Instituteof Education.

Andrews, J. (1988). Deaf children’s acquisitionof prereading skills using the reciprocalteaching procedure. Exceptional Children,54(4), 349–355.

Andrews, J., & Dionne, V. (2010). “Down thelanguage rabbit hole with Alice”: A casestudy of a deaf girl with a cochlear implant.International Journal of Otolaryngology,2011. doi:10.1155/2011/326379

Andrews, J., Gentry, M., & Jackson, K. (2012,February). Early literacy intervention forsigning deaf children: Six-month progressreport. Paper presented at the conference ofthe Association of College Educators–Deafand Hard of Hearing, Jacksonville, FL.

Andrews, J., Logan, R., & Phelan, J. (2008). Lan-guage milestones for speech, hearing, andASL. ADVANCE for Speech-Language Pathol-ogists and Audiologists, 18(2), 16–20.

Andrews, J., & Mason, J. (1984). How do youngdeaf children learn to read? A proposedmodel of deaf children’s emergent readingbehaviors (Technical Report No. 329).Champaign-Urbana: Center for the Study ofReading, University of Illinois.

Andrews, J., & Mason, J. (1986a). Childhooddeafness and the acquisition of early printconcepts. In D. Yaden Jr. & W. Templeton(Eds.), Metalinguistic awareness and be-ginning literacy: Conceptualizing what itmeans to read and write (pp. 277–290).Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

Andrews, J., & Mason, J. (1986b). How do deafchildren learn about prereading? AmericanAnnals of the Deaf, 131, 210–217.

Andrews, J., & Mason, J. (1991). Strategy useamong deaf and hearing readers. Excep-tional Children, 57(6), 536–545.

Andrews, J., Winograd, P., & DeVille, G. (1994).Deaf children reading fables: Using ASLsummaries to improve reading comprehen-sion. American Annals of the Deaf, 139(3),378–386.

Ashton-Warner, S. (1963). Teacher. New York,NY: Simon & Schuster.

Au, K., & Mason, J. (1983). Cultural congruencein classroom participation structures:Achieving a balance of rights. DiscourseProcess, 6, 145–167.

Au, K., Mason, J., & Scheu, J. (1995). Literacy in-struction for today. New York, NY: Harper-Collins.

Ausbrooks-Rusher, M., Schimmel, C., & Edwards,S. (2012). Utilizing Fairview as a bilingual re-

sponse to intervention: Comprehensive re-view and example data. Journal of Theoriesand Practice in Language Research 2(7),1317–1329.

Bahan, B. (1992). American Sign Language liter-ature: Inside the story. In J. Mann (Ed.),Conference proceedings, Deaf studies:What’s up? (pp. 153–166). Washington, DC:Gallaudet University Press.

Baker, C., & Jones, S. (1998). Double-semilin-gualism. In C. Baker & S. Jones, Encyclo -pedia of bilingualism and bilingualeducation (pp. 14–15). Clevedon, England:Multilingual Matters.

Baker, L., & Brown, A. (1984). Metacognitiveskills and reading. In D. Pearson (Ed.), Hand-book of reading research (pp. 353–394).New York, NY: Longman.

Baker, S. (2010). The importance of finger-spelling for reading. Washington, DC: Cen-ter for Visual Languages and VisualLearning, Gallaudet University.

Beck, I., & McKeown, M. (2007). Increasinglow-income children’s oral vocabularyrepertories through rich and focused in-struction. Elementary School Journal,107(3), 251–271.

Byrne, A. (1996). ASL storytelling to deaf chil-dren: “More! More! More!” In D. L. Smith &A.R. Small (Eds.), Teacher research in abilingual/bicultural school for deaf stu-dents (Bilingual/Bicultural Education forDeaf Students Monograph Series No. 1, pp.49–62). Toronto, Canada: Queen’s Printerfor Ontario.

Carden, C. (2008). Language and emergent lit-eracy in preschoolers with early cochlearimplantation. Unpublished master’s thesis,University of Florida, Gainesville.

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory ofsyntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Clay, M. (1975). What did I write? Beginningwriting behavior. Portsmouth, NH: Heine-mann.

Coyne, M. D., McCoach, D. B., & Kapp, S.(2007). Vocabulary intervention for kinder-garten students: Comparing extended in-struction to embedded instruction andincidental exposure. Learning DisabilityQuarterly, 30, 74–88.

Crume, P. (2012, April). Teachers’ perceptionson the use of ASL phonological instructionin an ASL/English bilingual deaf educationprogram. Paper presented at the confer-ence of the American Educational ResearchAssociation, Vancouver, Canada.

Duffy, G., Roehler, L., & Mason, J. (1984). Com-prehension instruction: Perspectives andsuggestions. New York, NY: Longman.

Dunning, D. B., Mason, J., & Stewart, J. (1994).Reading to preschoolers: A response toScarborough and Dobrich (1994) and rec-ommendations for future research. Devel-opmental Review, 14, 324–339.


317


Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition, andthe brain: Insights from sign language re-search. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Erting, C., & Pfau, J. (1997). Becoming bilin-gual: Facilitating English literacy develop-ment using ASL in preschool. Washington,DC: Pre-College National Mission Programs,Gallaudet University.

Ewoldt, C. (1981). A psycholinguistic descrip-tion of selected deaf children reading in signlanguage. Reading Research Quarterly,17(1), 58–59.

Flippo, R. (2012). The new common ground:Pulling it all together. In R. Flippo (Ed.),Reading researchers in search of commonground: The expert study revisited (2nd ed.,pp. 304–351). New York, NY: Routledge.

Fountas, J., & Pinnell, G. (1996). Guided read-ing. Good teaching for all children.Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Gallimore, L. (1999). Teachers’ stories: Teach-ing American Sign Language and Englishliteracy. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,University of Arizona, Tucson.

Garcia, G. E. (2000). Bilingual children’s read-ing. In M. Kamil, P. Rosenthal, P. D. Pearson,& R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading re-search: Volume 3 (pp. 813–834). Mahwah,NJ: Erlbaum.

Goldin-Meadow, R. (2001). How do profoundlydeaf children learn to read? Learning Dis-abilities Research and Practice, 16, 221–228.

Grosjean, F. (2008). Studying bilinguals. NewYork, NY: Oxford University Press.

Grosjean, F. (2010). Bilingual: Life and reality.Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hayes, L., & Shaw, P. (1997). Guidelines for se-lecting read-aloud books for deaf childrenas suggested by storytellers using AmericanSign Language. In M. P. Moeller & B. Schick(Eds.), Deafness and diversity: Sociolin-guistics issues (pp. 29–37). Omaha, NE:Boys Town National Research Hospital.

Health, S. B. (1983). Way with words: Lan-guage, life, and work in communities andclassrooms. New York, NY: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Herbold, J. (2008). Emergent literacy develop-ment: Case studies of four deaf ASL-Englishbilinguals. Unpublished doctoral disserta-tion, University of Arizona, Tucson.

Hitchings, H. (2008). The secret life of words:How English became English. New York, NY:Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Humphries, T. (2004). The modern Deaf self: In-digenous practices and educational impera-tives. In B. Brueggemann (Ed.), Literacyand deaf people: Cultural and contextualperspectives (pp. 29–58). Washington, DC:Gallaudet University Press.

King, C., & Quigley, S. (1985). Reading anddeafness. San Diego, CA: College Hill.

Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking thepaths to literacy. New York, NY: Taylor &Francis.

Leung, C. B. (2008). Preschoolers’ acquisition ofscientific vocabulary through repeated read-alouds, retellings, and hands-on science ac-tivities. Reading Psychology, 29, 165–193.

Livingston, S., & Collins, M. (1994). How to readaloud to deaf children and young adults. InB. Snider (Ed.), Post-Milan ASL and Englishliteracy: Issues, trends, and research (pp.63–74). Washington, DC: Gallaudet Univer-sity Press.

Lonigan, C. J., & Whitehurst, G. J. (1998). Rela-tive efficacy of parent and teacher involve-ment in a shared-reading intervention forpreschool children from low-income back-grounds. Early Childhood Research Quar-terly, 13, 263–290.

Mason, J. (1980). When do children begin to read? An exploration of four-year-oldchildren’s letter and word reading compe-tencies. Reading Research Quarterly, 2,203–237.

Mason, J. (1981). Prereading: A developmentalperspective (Technical Report No. 198). Ur-bana: Center for the Study of Reading, Uni-versity of Illinois.

Mason, J. (1989). (Ed.). Reading and writingconnections. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Mason, J. (1992). Reading stories to preliteratechildren: A proposed connection to read-ing. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, & R. Treiman(Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp.215–241).Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Mason, J., & Allen, J. (1986). A review of emer-gent literacy with implications for researchand practice in reading. Review of Researchin Education, 13, 3–47.

Mason, J., Herman, P., & Au, K. (1990). Chil-dren’s development knowledge of words(Technical Report No. 513). Champaign- Urbana: Center for the Study of Reading,University of Illinois.

Mather, S. (1989). Visually oriented teachingstrategies with deaf preschool children. InC. Lucas (Ed.), The sociolinguistics of theDeaf community (pp. 109–131). Washing-ton, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Mather, S. (1996). Initiation in visually con-structed dialogue: Reading books withthree-to-eight-year-old students who aredeaf and hard of hearing. In C. Lucas (Ed.),Multicultural aspects of sociolinguistics inthe Deaf community (pp. 109–131). Wash-ington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Mayberry, R. (1993). First-language acquisitionafter childhood differs from second-lan-guage acquisition: The case of AmericanSign Language. Journal of Speech andHearing Research, 36, 1258–1270.

Mayberry, R. (1998). The critical period for lan-guage acquisition and the deaf child’s lan-guage comprehension: A psycholinguisticapproach. Bulletin d’Audiophonologie An-nales Scientifiques de L’Université deFrancheComt, 15, 349–358.

McCormick, C., & Mason, J. (1986). Interven-

tion procedures for increasing preschoolchildren’s interest in and knowledge aboutreading. In W. Teale & E. Sulzby (Eds.),Emergent literacy: Reading and writing(pp. 90–115). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

McCormick, C., & Mason, J. (1990). Little books.Chicago, IL: Scott Foresman.

McQuarrie, L. (2008). Phonology and deafreaders: New insights on an old debate.Saarbrucken, Germany: Verlag Dr. MullerAktiengesellschaft.

Nover, S., & Andrews, J. (1998). Critical peda-gogy in deaf education: Bilingual method-ology and staff development. Washington,DC: Office of Educational Research and Im-provement, U.S. Department of Education.

Olshavsky, J. (1976–1977). Reading as problemsolving: An investigation of strategies.Reading Research Quarterly, 12(4), 654–674.

Palinscar, A. (1984). The quest for meaningfrom expository text: A teacher-guided jour-ney. In G. Duffy, L. Roehler, & J. Mason(Eds.), Comprehension instruction: Per-spectives and suggestions (pp. 251–264).New York, NY: Longman.

Paul, P. (1984). The comprehension of multi-meaning words from selected frequencylevels by deaf and hearing subjects (Unpub-lished doctoral dissertation). University ofIllinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Paul, P. (2001). Language and deafness. SanDiego, CA: Singular.

Paul, P. (2010). Qualitative similarity hypothesis.In R. Nata (Ed.), Progress in education: Vol.20 (pp. 1–31). New York, NY: Teachers Col-lege Press.

Paul, P. (2012). The demise of the caboose . . .and the need for word consciousness.American Annals of the Deaf, 156(5),435–437.

Paul, P., & Lee, C. (2010). The qualitative similar-ity hypothesis. American Annals of theDeaf, 154(5), 456–462.

Paul, P., & Moores, D. (2010). Introduction:Toward an understanding of epistemologyand deafness. American Annals of the Deaf,154(5), 421–427.

Payne, J.-A. (1982). A study of the comprehen-sion of verb-particle combinations amongdeaf and hearing subjects. Unpublisheddoctoral dissertation, University of Illinois,Urbana-Champaign.

Phillips, L., Norris, S., & Mason, J. (1996). Longi-tudinal effects of early literacy concepts onreading achievement: A kindergarten inter-vention and five-year follow-up. Journal ofLiteracy Research, 28(1), 173–195.

Plaza-Pust, C., & Morales-Lopez, E. (2008). Signbilingualism: Language development, inter-action, and maintenance in sign languagecontact situations. In C. Plaza-Pust & E.Morales-Lopez (Eds.), Sign bilingualism:Language development, interaction, andmaintenance in sign language contact sit-


318




319

uations (pp. 333–379). Philadelphia, PA:John Benjamins.

Purcell-Gates, V. (1997). Other people’s words:The cycle of low literacy. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

Quigley, S. P., McAnally, P., Rose, S., & King, C.(2001) Reading milestones. Austin, TX:Pro-Ed.

Quigley, S. P., McAnally, P., Rose, S., & Payne, J.(2003). Reading bridges. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.

Quigley, S. P., Wilbur, R., Montanelli, D., &Steinkamp, M. (1976). Syntactic structuresin the language of deaf children. Urbana-Champaign: Institute for Child Behavior andDevelopment, University of Illinois.

Rayman, R. (1999). Storytellling in the visualmode: A Comparison of ASL and English. InE. Winston (Ed.), Storytelling and conver-sation: Discourse in Deaf communities(pp. 59–70). Washington, DC: GallaudetUniversity Press.

Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of hu-man development. New York: NY, OxfordUniversity Press.

Sass-Lehrer, M. (2011). Early intervention: Birthto three. In M. Marschark & P. E. Spencer(Eds.), The Oxford handbook of deaf stud-ies, language, and education. (2nd ed.,pp. 63–81). New York: NY: Oxford UniversityPress.

Scarborough, H. S., & Dobrich, W. (1994). Onthe efficacy of reading to preschoolers. De-velopmental Review, 14, 245–301.

Schleper, D. R. (1997). Reading to deaf chil-dren: Learning from deaf adults. A man-ual for parents and teachers. Washington,DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Silverman, R. (2007). A comparison of three

methods of vocabulary instruction duringread-alouds in kindergarten. ElementarySchool Journal, 108(2), 97–113.

Simms, L., Andrews, J., & Smith, A. (2005). Abalanced approach to literacy instructionfor deaf signing children. Balanced Read-ing Instruction, 12, 39–54.

Smith, A., & Jacobowitz, L. (2005). Have youever seen . . . ? An American Sign Language(ASL) handshape DVD/book. Frederick,MD: ASL Rose.

Snodden, K. (2011). Action research with a fam-ily ASL literacy program. Writing and Peda-gogy, 3(1), 265–288.

Stallman, A., & Pearson, P. D. (1990). Formalmeasures of early literacy. In L. Morrow & J.Smith (Eds.), Assessment for instruction inearly literacy (pp. 7–44). Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice Hall.

Stanovich, K. (1984). The interactive-compen-satory model of reading: The confluence ofdevelopmental, experimental, and educa-tional psychology. Remedial and SpecialEducation, 5(3), 11–19.

Teale, W., & Sulzby, E. (1986). Emergent liter-acy: Reading and writing. Norwood, NJ:Ablex.

Thompson, N. (2000). Sylvia Ashton-Warner:Reclaiming personal meaning in literacyteaching. The English Journal, 89(3), 90–96.

Tierney, R., & Cunningham, J. (1984). Researchon teaching comprehension. In D. Pearson,R. Barr, M. Kamil, & P. Mosenthal (Eds.),Handbook of reading research (pp.609–655). New York, NY: Longman.

Tierney, R., Readance, J., & Dishner, E. (1985).Reading strategies and practices. Newton,MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Trelease, J. (1994). The read-aloud handbook.(4th ed.). New York, NY: Penguin.

Trezek, B., Wang, Y., & Paul, P. (2010). Readingand deafness: Theory, research, and prac-tice. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Learning.

Valli, C., & Lucas, C. (2000). Linguistics ofAmerican Sign Language: An introduc-tion. Washington, DC: Gallaudet UniversityPress.

Wang, Y. (2010). Without boundaries: An in-quiry into Deaf epistemologies through ametaparadigm. American Annals of theDeaf, 154(5), 428–438.

Wasik, B. A., & Bond, M. A. (2001). Beyond thepages of a book: Interactive book readingand language development in the preschoolclassrooms. Journal of Educational Psy-chology, 93, 243–250.

Williams, C. (2000). Emergent literacy and deafchildren. Journal of Deaf Studies and DeafEducation, 9(4), 352–365.

Williams, C. (2012). Invited essay: Promotingvocabulary learning in young children whoare d/Deaf and hard of hearing. Translatingresearch into practice. American Annals ofthe Deaf, 156(5), 501–508.

Yaden, D. B., Rowe, D. W., & McGillivray, L.(2000). Emergent literacy: A matter (poly -phony) of perspectives. In M. Kamil, P.Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.),Handbook of reading research: Volume 3(pp. 425–454). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Yaden, D. B., & Tardibuona, J. M. (2012). Emer-gent writing development and second-lan-guage learners. In R. F. Flippo (Ed.),Reading researcher in search of commonground (pp. 170–203). New York, NY: Taylor& Francis.


Documents

Reading to Deaf Children Who Sing