Special Education Research and Development Center on Reading Instruction for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students

The main findings of this project, as reported by the principal investigator, are as follows:

• DHH children’s reading ability depended on whether they were acquiring spoken or visual language. For DHH children who use spoken language, reading was related to spoken phonological awareness and spoken English. For children who use sign, reading was primarily related to fingerspelling phonological awareness and American Sign Language (ASL). These qualitative differences indicate that signing DHH children need different instructional practices from those used with hearing children or DHH children learning only spoken language (Lederberg, et al. 2019).
• Overall, children showed delays in language and reading compared to the test norms established for hearing children. In the area of language, vocabulary (though delayed) showed gains over the school year. Children showed the most severe delays in expressive English syntax. Sign-only and bimodal children showed gains in ASL receptive syntax. In the area of reading, the research team found that reading declined from kindergarten to second grade (Antia et al., 2020).
• Teachers’ instruction influenced the amount their DHH students learned during the school year. Students made greater language gains when their teachers expanded student language and gave simple definitions for novel words. Students’ reading gains were related to the amount of time their teacher taught them how to decode printed words and the quality of that instruction, specifically the clarity of instruction and classroom management.
• Foundations for Literacy is a year-long early literacy program specifically designed for DHH 3- to 6-year-olds. A national clustered randomized controlled study provided strong evidence that DHH children taught with Foundations enter elementary school with better foundational skills than DHH children receiving their typical instruction. It is the only evidence-based early literacy intervention specifically developed for DHH children and is being used by teachers in 35 states across the country.
• Fingerspelling Our Way to Reading (FOWR) is a full-year supplemental reading program for signing deaf children in kindergarten through second grade. The program was developed based on the research team’s initial observational research and has two components—the first involves using fingerspelling to teach children to read words and the second explicitly teaches connections between American Sign Language and English. The research suggested that FOWR shows promise for improving DHH children’s word reading, reading comprehension, and fingerspelling abilities. It is being used by teachers in 24 states across the United States.
• Explicit Contextualized Vocabulary Instruction provides sample lessons and instructions on how to use both explicit and in-context strategies to teach vocabulary. A series of single-case design studies showed that the children were able to learn new vocabulary and also use the new vocabulary in their spontaneous language.
• Syntax to Reading is an intervention designed to develop fluency in the expressive use of targeted syntactical structures. The intervention includes activities to call children’s attention to the targeted syntactical structures, interactive reading of stories that included the target structures, and practice activities that elicit the target structures in single sentences and in longer narratives. The Center’s single-subject research study showed that the children were able to use the target structures productively in connected language.