New VL2 (Gallaudet) Study: skilled vs. less skilled deaf readers: Why?

GrendelQ

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Factors Distinguishing Skilled and Less Skilled Deaf Readers: Evidence From Four Orthographies Oxford Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Fall 2012

Came across a very interesting article with some practical solutions offered. A century of research demonstrates that, on average, prelingually deaf readers graduate from high school with reading skills comparable to hearing third and fourth graders, with similar findings as recently as 2010. This gap in reading ability (or more specifically, comprehension deficit) is well-documented, but what’s been missing in the literature is “why.”

Several researchers from various universities conducted a study funded by Gallaudet’s VL2 Project to better understand the primary causes underlying reading failure in deaf students. They tested 213 prelingually deaf 6th through 10th graders from environments using four different writing systems (Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German) and grouped into three reading levels to determine the factors distinguishing skilled from less skilled deaf readers.

The study findings strongly suggest that “poor comprehension skills of prelingually deaf readers are primarily related to variance in their ability to apply structural knowledge as they read for meaning.” These finding run contrary to the most widely held position that deficits in prelingually deaf readers’ reading comprehension skills are directly causally related to their poor phonological processing skills. The authors add that “comprehension failure in this population seems to arise from reliance on a reading strategy that skips the processing of sentence structure as a vital source of information, as well as reliance on insufficiently developed and/or deviant structural knowledge for the processing of text meaning.”

The VL2 group draws from these findings the following implications:
1. Deafness per se doesn’t create a condition that prevents individuals from becoming skilled readers.
2. Reading skills of prelingually deaf individuals develop independently of their phonological processing skills
3. Full access to language* facilitates the acquisition of structural and semantic knowledge essential for the adequate processing of written language and, consequently, reduces risk of failure when prelingually deaf individuals are asked to read for meaning.

(*not just spoken, this includes sign language -- just has to be in fluent and frequent use by role models in their everyday surroundings)
 
And this is what they recommend:

(1) Access to a language they can acquire easily and in accordance with their cognitive and emotional needs from intact role models in their surrounding;
(2) the promotion of awareness of sentence word order as an important source of information in the processing/comprehension of written/spoken language;
(3) instruction that systematically and explicitly traces modification in sentence meaning back to specific modification in syntactic structure;
(4) opportunities to apply and generalize newly acquired rule-based knowledge through repeated practice within reader-relevant reading materials;
(5) the provision of consistent feedback on accurate use of rules; and
(6) encouragement of the development and use of prior knowledge in the form of elaborated knowledge domains and structures to allow deaf students to infer meaning from written texts by mapping words to prior metacognitive structures
 
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This is a point in the article of Knoors and Marschark. It's important that the language is provided by a rolemodel. Learning languages without such a rolemodel and without being exposed to it to a high degree can be damaging to the overall result.

When we started sign language I never felt that I would be able to be a rolemodel for Lotte. Without being immersed in Deaf society (or born CODA) one will not be able to be a rolemodel.
Teaching Lotte signs, and communicating with signs is NOT signlanguage. That language is just as complex as any other language (OK.. Half as complex due to the lack of writing. ;-)
We would be able to be a rolemodel for Lotte in Dutch and Norwegian however... and that is what we focused on.

Perhaps Lotte will explore signlanguage in the future. E.g. there is a highschool in Norway ( Ål folkehøyskole ) where she would be able to study for 1 year, where signlanguage is the main language.. That exposure would be a way to really learn signlanguage. With rolemodels around her and full exposure..
 
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