reading to deaf children who sign: a response to ...

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

INVITED ESSAY

READING TO DEAF CHILDREN WHO SIGN: A RESPONSE TO WILLIAMS (2012) AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

A

JEAN F. ANDREWS

ANDREWS IS A PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF DEAF STUDIES/DEAF EDUCATION, LAMAR UNIVERSITY, BEAUMONT, TX.

on Williams’s (2012) invited article on the use of adapted vocabulary learning interventions focuses on three areas: (a) Vocabulary interventions with storybook reading originally designed for hearing children can be adapted for deaf children. (b) Teachers are invited to reflect on how the read-aloud process in English differs from the read-aloud process in sign. (b) Teachers are asked to consider adding drawing and writing activities to reading lessons to show young deaf readers how reading and writing are reciprocal processes. The emergent literacy theory is used, as it informs and drives instructional vocabulary 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 signing deaf children acquire both English word recognition abilities and vocabulary knowledge, among other important prereading concepts.

C O M M E N TA R Y

Keywords: prereading, emergent literacy, signing deaf children, storybook reading, vocabulary, word knowledge

In her invited essay on the promotion of vocabulary learning in young children with hearing loss (published in the Winter 2012 issue of the Annals, Williams (2012) takes an optimistic stance, recommending that seven specific classroom vocabulary interventions with storybook reading that have been used effectively with hearing children be adapted to meet the needs of deaf and hard of hearing children. Williams notes that these interventions, which she describes in her arti-

cle, have yielded gains in the vocabulary learning of hearing children. Each intervention takes a whole language approach. It begins with a shared book-reading or read-aloud storybook session led by the teacher. Companion activities employ instruction that emphasizes both meaning and code. These activities include storybook reading with dialogic or interactive approaches (Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998); explicit vocabulary instruction (Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998); the use of props and language extension activities (Wasik & Bond, 2001); embedded “rich instruction” of specific vocabulary (Beck & McKeown, 2007); extended instruction of vocabulary before, during,

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and after the lesson (Coyne, McCoach, & Kapp, 2007); “anchored instruction” that focuses children’s attention on the phonological and orthographic patterns in vocabulary (Silverman, 2007); and student retellings (Leung, 2008). Writing in the context of new and recent developments such as the implementation of universal newborn hearing screening, the advances in auditory assistive technology such as digital hearing aids and cochlear implants, and the fact that more deaf infants from birth to age 3 years are enrolled in early childhood programs (Sass-Lehrer, 2011), Williams provides theoretical insight and practical classroom instructional interventions aimed at developing English vocabulary with storybook reading for young deaf children in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Williams uses two working hypotheses to support her argument for vocabulary learning interventions. One is the sociocultural, socially mediated theory of Rogoff (2003), described by Williams as a process in which “young children acquire language through face-to-face or through-the-air conversation as they participate in a variety of socioculturally situated activities that are rich in meaning and coherent” (p. 502). Sociocultural theories related to early literacy have been related to children in other cultures, such as Hawaiian children (Au & Mason, 1983), children in a family in urban Appalachia (PurcellGates, 1997), children in African-American and White communities in North Carolina (Heath, 1983), and children in Latino communities (Garcia, 2000), as well as to culturally Deaf children of deaf parents (Herbold, 2008). The second supporting hypothesis Williams presents is the Qualitatively Similar Hypothesis (QSH). Originally developed by Paul and colleagues (Paul, 2010; Paul & Lee, 2010), the QSH

is based on the interactive-compensatory model of reading. Developed by Stanovich (1984), the interactive-compensatory model is used to provide a framework for understanding deaf and hard of hearing children’s reading development, which is believed to proceed more slowly but in the same sequence as hearing children’s reading development (Paul, 2010; Paul & Lee, 2010). In addition to the QSH, Paul has made other contributions to the vocabulary knowledge research base, starting with his 1984 dissertation on multiple-meaning words, which has been followed by numerous other publications on the vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary learning of deaf students (see, e.g., Paul, 2001). In an editorial in the issue of the Annals in which Williams’s invited essay appeared, citing his language experiences with his son and his students, as well as his vocabulary research, Paul reinforces Williams’s key points by underscoring the importance of stimulating word consciousness, curiosity about words, and vocabulary knowledge in deaf students of all ages (Paul, 2012). On the basis of the social mediation theory (Rogoff, 2003) and the QSH (Paul, 2010; Paul & Lee, 2010), her own extensive work with deaf children and reading, and her review of vocabulary interventions originally designed for hearing students, Williams concludes that these interventions could provide “a framework for developing evidence-based instructional interventions that can promote vocabulary development in young children who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing” (p. 506). She argues that deaf children could benefit from these same interventions, and she lays out a research plan for replication. My commentary on Williams’s invited essay addresses three areas. First, I respond to her recommendation of the use of adapted vocabulary instruc-

tional interventions, using my teaching experiences and studies to expand on her notion of adaptation. Second, I invite teachers and researchers to reflect on the storybook read-aloud process for signing deaf children and to think about how it is similar and dissimilar to this process as used with hearing children. Third, I suggest that teachers and researchers consider adding drawing and writing to storybook read-aloud sessions to show deaf children the reciprocal relationship between reading and writing. This can be accomplished even with young deaf children at the emergent writing level, as their drawings and scribbles can support their emergent literacy processes as well as activate their imagination and creativity (Mason, 1989; Teale & Sulzby, 1986). Finally, I recommend that in order to increase understanding of children’s development of knowledge of words, both word recognition and vocabulary knowledge, additional longitudinal studies based on the emergent literacy framework need to be done to document how deaf children learn about words through meaning-based and code-based reading interventions that include storybook reading, drawing, and writing. As such, longitudinal studies using whole stories can document how deaf children map stories, sentences, words, and letters onto their sign language and fingerspelling if one supports visual approaches (Allen et al., 2009; Goldin-Meadow, 2001; McQuarrie, 2008; Nover & Andrews, 1998). Or if one’s orientation is to the speechto-print match, to alternative visual “phonological” approaches such as Visual Phonics or Cued Speech to print match (see reviews of these studies in Trezek, Wang, & Paul, 2010), or to a combination of both, all throughout this commentary I underscore the importance of reading researchers collecting data on reading behaviors of 305

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A RESPONSE TO WILLIAMS (2012) children reading whole stories, as Williams suggests. Indeed, research with hearing children has shown that reading whole stories is also one of the best ways to teach deaf children how to read, as they use their background knowledge and prior experience to construct meaning by integrating perceptual and word knowledge in order to develop reading comprehension skills, particularly at the emergent literacy level, as suggested by Mason (1992). Isolated componential subskills such as developing letter knowledge by matching the alphabet to the manual handshape, matching an ASL handshape to an ASL sign, matching a picture to a print word or a graphic depiction of a sign, matching letters of the alphabet to sound symbol knowledge, and matching phonemes to graphemes and sounds to words all have a place in assessment and instruction. But if these activities are presented outside the context of whole stories, this is not reading. Indeed, children are given a false sense of what reading is from these matching activities. In effect, they spend time “getting ready” to learn to read rather than engage in the reading of stories from the 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 they are, but simply the recognition of letters and words in decontextualized settings. An expected response to the storybook suggestion may be “If children cannot read any words, how can they read a whole storybook?” A reasonable counterresponse is that there are many picture books available for emergent readers, with a wide range of connected language in them such as high-frequency words and simple phrases and sentences.

Adapted Interventions

Ashton-Warner and Organic Teaching Williams’s recommendations for the use of adapted interventions ring true with my teaching experiences. My first reading adaptation was taken from the book Teacher, written by the New Zealand reading educator and novelist Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1963), who worked with Maori children. AshtonWarner asked her students, “What words do you want?” She then proceeded to give them the vocabulary they wanted to learn, word such as love, fight, and kiss. I adapted AshtonWarner’s intervention for teaching deaf students their “favorite words” based on signs I saw them using. To this end, I copied graphic pictures of signs out of a sign language book and pasted the sign drawings with their printed English word equivalent along with a sample English sentence on psychedelic-colored poster board on the classroom wall. Then, students stood by the cards, picked out their “favorite signs and words,” and then made up stories in sign language on the spot, using these words to entertain their classmates. It was a popular activity with the children, as they were using their sign language to read English. Ashton-Warner (1963) called her theory “Organic Teaching.” Discouraged by the low achievement of the Maori children, who were not succeeding with British methods of learning to read, she used the children’s Maori language and culture to build a bridge to the English language and culture. While, like Ashton-Warner, I was discouraged by my students’ low English scores, I was encouraged by their rich discourse in sign language. Aston-Warner (1963) also had her young students author their own books from their language experiences. For this she has been called the “mother of the language experience”

approach; some have even credited her with creating strategies that were precursors to the whole language movement and multicultural education (Thompson, 2000). In the early 1970s, one insight that my reading colleagues at the Maryland School for the Deaf and I often discussed in the teacher’s lounge was that if we could harness our students’ sign language skills and use these skills to hike up their English vocabulary, then we would be successful reading teachers. But I soon discovered that mapping single signs to print was not enough. How words were arranged in sentences—that is, the syntax or the grammatical structure of words—had to be considered. Vocabulary words typically do not occur in single-word environments unless they are in the context of environmental print (e.g., a stop sign) or are on a standardized reading test! Indeed, the English language is largely shaped by word order and the use of particles such as prepositions and conjunctions, and if you change the word order of a sentence, you change the meaning (Hitchings, 2008). For instance, Hitchings uses an amusing example in the sentence “Fred ate ostrich.” The meaning of this sentence is dramatically different from that of the sentence “Ostrich ate Fred” (p. 9).

Adapting Syntax Reading and Language Materials The difficulties deaf readers have with English syntax was brought to my attention and to the forefront of deaf education in the 1980s with Stephen Quigley and colleagues’ syntax research (Quigley, Wilbur, Montanelli, & Steinkamp, 1976) based on the theories of Noam Chomsky (1965) relating to transformational grammar. Chomsky described transformational grammar as a system of language analysis that recognizes the relationships be-

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tween words in a sentence and uses rules (transformations) to express these relationships. Quigley et al. (1976) analyzed basal readers and found many complex English structures that deaf children could not read. The work of Quigley et al. in transformational grammar and that of Payne (1982) in verb particles refocused the deaf education field into going beyond the level of single vocabulary words in understanding deaf children’s reading difficulties and examining nine specific syntactic structures and 64 verb particle combinations that deaf students had difficulty reading and writing. From multiple studies, Quigley and various colleagues developed the Test of Syntactic Abilities, or TSA (Quigley et al., 1976), and the Test of Verb Particles (Payne, 1982), as well as language materials for young deaf students. On the basis of Quigley’s syntax research, Quigley, McAnally, Rose, and King (2001) wrote Reading Milestones, while Quigley, McAnally, Rose, and Payne (2003) developed Reading Bridges. These are two language-controlled basal reading programs that are still widely used in schools and programs for deaf children and for hearing children with reading disabilities. Another product of Quigley’s work was Reading and Deafness (King & Quigley, 1985), the first textbook on reading and deafness based on linguistic and reading research. This book pulled together not only Quigley and colleagues’ insights about deaf students’ knowledge of reading, vocabulary, and grammar, but the work of other reading scholars at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois.

The North Carolina Project: Storybook Reading and Reciprocal Teaching Mason’s work showed that while reading stories to children was found to

foster later reading achievement, storybook reading was not enough. It required coaching and support from parents and teachers (Mason, 1992). Using this storybook reading concept, Andrews and Mason (1986a, 1986b) adapted an emergent literacy intervention from studies with hearing nursery school children that incorporated teacher and parent book sharing and support (Mason, 1980, 1981). The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to measure the impact of an adaptation of Mason’s intervention called “Little Books” on the promotion of emergent literacy skills in kindergarten and first-grade students at a state school for the deaf. The treatment consisted of 20 storybookreading sessions at school conducted in Total Communication (signs and speech) (Andrews & Mason, 1986a, 1986b). Students’ progress was measured with several pretests and posttests adapted from measurements used with hearing children in nursery school (Mason, 1980, 1981). In the study, which we called the North Carolina project, we focused on weekly storybook reading using a modification of the reciprocal teaching procedure (Palinscar, 1984). In the reading lesson, the first step was modeling, in which the experimenter signed one of the storybooks to the children, focusing on meaning. Next, to help the children focus on the meaning of the story and the vocabulary, a discussion was conducted using three to five of the vocabulary words targeted for that session. Next, guided reading took place, with each student reading the story to the group. Lowerskilled students who had difficulty were supported by higher-skilled students. Supervised practice followed, with the children participating in joint reading activities such as reading books to peers, reciting the story plots with the assistance of peers, and

acting out the stories. At the end of the session, the children were given copies of the books to keep and take home to read to their parents (Andrews & Mason, 1986a, 1986b). Even though the control group showed slightly more knowledge at the beginning of the study, the treatment group outperformed the control group in the posttest phase on the overall test of prereading print knowledge, thus showing the impact of the “Little Books” intervention program (Andrews & Mason, 1986a, 1986b). We not only found that the yearlong intervention jump-started vocabulary, but that the children in the North Carolina project made gains in the acquisition of print concepts, fingerspelling, book reading, story reciting, and spelling (Andrews, 1988; Andrews & Mason, 1984, 1986a, 1986b).

Expository Texts and Metacognitive and WordAttack Strategies Another adapted intervention from the hearing reading literature that Mason and I experimented with (Andrews & Mason, 1991) was the use of metacognitive strategies based on the cognitive-interactive-perspective view of reading (Anderson, 2000; L. Baker & Brown, 1984; Duffy, Roehler, & Mason, 1984). In a descriptive study (Andrews & Mason, 1991), Mason and I compared the comprehension strategies of 15 deaf and hearing students reading passages from expository texts. Three groups of students were tested: (a) deaf youths in high school (n = 5) reading at the 2nd-to-6th-grade levels, (b) hearing children in elementary school reading at grade level (n = 5), and (c) hearing high school youths with reading disabilities (n = 5) who were reading four grades below grade level. Individually, students were asked to read three expository passages in 307

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A RESPONSE TO WILLIAMS (2012) which key words were missing. We adapted a technique called protocol analysis (Olshavsky, 1976–1977) and used a cloze procedure. We modified this procedure by asking the students to explain how they chose their words to fill in the cloze blanks. Their self-reports were in the form of sign language for the deaf youths and verbal reports for the hearing youths. Examination of strategy type showed that the hearing readers used more strategies than the deaf readers. Hearing readers made more use of context clues and the title to figure out meanings of words in the passages. The less able deaf readers were more likely to simply re-read and use their background knowledge to fill in the cloze passages, some of which did not always help them find the right answer. We also documented how the deaf readers were analyzing vocabulary words they did not know and how they used their word attack skills. The most skilled deaf reader (reading at the sixth-grade level) used sound-recoding strategies to a great extent. He would sign the text and use voice. But before filling in the deleted part on the cloze segment, he would silently mouth all the words while he was reading. But he also frequently used sign-recoding strategies. The most common strategy used by the deaf readers was fingerspelling. They would fingerspell words they did not know, thus using fingerspelling as a placeholder (Ewoldt, 1981). At other times, they would fingerspell a word they did not know, pause and think, then give the sign equivalent, thus showing the experimenter that they understood the word. We also observed our five deaf readers to use graphemic strategies. However, use of this word attack strategy more often resulted in an incorrect response. For instance, the word there was signed THE, and farther was signed FATHER. The bet-

ter-skilled deaf readers would often go back and self-correct, thus showing an ability to reconstruct the meaning of a sentence or paragraph based on semantic knowledge. Deaf readers also were observed using a combination of strategies, which became apparent when they were reading compound or multisyllabic words. For instance, the word wasteland was read with two signs, WASTE and LAND. Frequently, students would break down a word using both signs and fingerspelling, thus showing morphological awareness, as in FARM + I-N-G.

Summaries and Reading Fables Peter Winograd, Gayle DeVille, and I (Andrews, Winograd, & DeVille, 1994) adapted another intervention based on a cognitive, schema-directed approach to comprehension instruction (Duffy et al., 1984). The purpose was to build background knowledge about a text using previews or summaries presented in American Sign Language (Andrews et al., 1994). Factors such as prior experiences and background knowledge that readers bring to the text are considered critical in helping them make sense of what they are reading (Tierney & Cunningham, 1984), and we devised the ASL summary to provide background knowledge. Seven children from an elementary department at a state school for the deaf were the participants. They ranged in ages from 11 to 12 years. All were prelingually deaf, with severe to profound hearing losses. Reading scores ranged from second to fifth grade on the Stanford Achievement Test—Hearing Impaired Edition. Three groups of hearing youths were used as a comparison group. We reviewed several techniques that build background knowledge in

hearing readers (Tierney, Readance, & Dishner, 1985), then adapted one for use with deaf students. Our technique, called the ASL summary technique, had four steps: (a) The teacher summarized a three-page fable and signed it to a student in ASL; (b) the student read the printed English text of the fable from a book; (c) the student retold all he or she could remember of the ASL summary and reading; and (d) the student reflected, then told the researcher what he or she thought the moral lesson of the fable was. The moral lesson for each fable was neither explicitly stated in the printed text nor mentioned in the ASL summary. Thus, this constituted a true test of our intervention, as the student had to go beyond the facts of the story and make inferences to figure out the moral lesson of the fable. Each student read two fables in each session. In the first session, each student would read fable 1 and fable 2 without the ASL intervention. In the second session, the students would read fable 3 with the ASL intervention and fable 4 without the intervention. In the third session, each student would read fable 5 with the intervention and fable 6 without the intervention. The fables were counterbalanced across the participants. All sessions were videotaped and transcribed into English. The means and the standard deviations for the number of pausal units retold on the four measures were higher during the readings of fables 3 and 5 with the ASL summary intervention. Compared to the hearing readers, the deaf readers scored lower on the measure of telling the moral lesson. This finding was expected because the hearing readers had the advantage of reading in their native language. While the data among deaf readers did not reach statistical significance on the moral lesson measure,

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there were higher scores on stories for which the deaf reader received the ASL summary intervention.

Storybook Reading for Enjoyment Our next adapted intervention took the form of an exploratory qualitative study at our speech and hearing clinic. Vickie Dionne and I (Andrews & Dionne, 2010) provided signing deaf children with cochlear implants many opportunities for daily storybook reading for pleasure during a 4week reading camp. Six deaf children ages 5 to 8 years who were in elementary school and had received a cochlear implant after age 4 participated in our camp. All were reading at the kindergarten to first-grade level, with the exception of one boy who tested at the second-grade level, and all had received implants after age 4 years (Andrews & Dionne, 2010). The goal of our study was to provide an enjoyable environment for children in which they could enjoy reading, writing, drawing, speaking, and listening freely using whatever language or combinations of languages they wanted—ASL, spoken English, Signed English, or a mixture of all three—in a supportive environment. Our secondary goal was to document how often and in what contexts the children code-switched and codemixed the two languages—ASL and spoken and signed English. The reading camp focused on daily storybook reading of children’s literature as well as looking at wordless picture books. We used a deaf native signer to provide stories in ASL, and speech-language pathologists who knew no signs to present the same stories in spoken English during the same day. Follow-up activities included discussion of concepts and vocabulary, relating story events to the students’ personal experiences, art and play ac-

tivities, karaoke signing (the most popular activity), and field trips to the campus bookstore to use speech to order ice cream and candy. We found that all the children code-switched from ASL to speech and from speech to ASL, or from ASL to Simultaneous Communication or vice versa, often throughout the camp days, depending on the language used by the children’s conversational partners. We also identified four levels of code-switching ability among the children, from single words to sentences (Andrews & Dionne, 2010). Based on our 4 weeks of observations in the camp, we concluded that the contact linguistic insights of Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez (2008) explained some of the language behaviors of our students. Using an interdisciplinary approach including the field of contact linguistics, Plaza-Pust and Morales-Lopez argue that deaf children’s sign bilingualism should be viewed in a positive vein. In other words, the two researchers studied and conceptualized how the two languages in two different modalities interact and form a cross-modal language mixing that could be viewed as a linguistic resource rather than deviant language development.

Alabama Project: Adapted Little Book Intervention for Signing Deaf Children In a current emergent literacy study (the Alabama study), we are following 25 signing deaf children longitudinally over 14 months. The children are participating in 20 teacher/student shared book-reading sessions in school (over 9 months) and 10 sessions at home (3 months in the summer). While in the North Carolina emergent literacy study the experimenter used Total Communication (Andrews & Mason, 1986a, 1986b), in this new emergent literacy study the teachers are using

ASL Discourse (ASL conversations and ASL storytelling) (Rayman, 1999). The instructional materials include companion English-language picturephrase books: “Big Books” (enlarged books) and “Little Books” (adapted from McCormick & Mason, 1990). The 20 books have been translated into ASL by a deaf mother or father and placed on a DVD. The children view the digital storybook reading as well as view the storybook reading by the teacher “live face to face.” The “Little Book” program we are currently adapting has been used with more than 400 hearing children in Illinois and Newfoundland (McCormick & Mason, 1986; Philips, Norris, & Mason, 1996), and with deaf children in North Carolina (Andrews & Mason, 1986a, 1986b), and has been found to show positive gains in children’s emergent literacy skills. Measures included a standardized early literacy concept test, a set of observational tasks, teacher and parent interviews, and the collection of writing samples. Children were also videotaped six times over the school year, and growth curve regression analyses were done on their book-reading and book-reciting tasks. Relationships between child background variables and pretest/posttest scores were 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 regression analysis which showed that 25 children progressed at an overall average of 6.08% each month from August to December on the book-reading tasks, while there were, on average, 4.09% increases each month in bookreciting learning. Data were interpreted in the light of limited exposure to ASL. Of the 20 children who had hearing parents, 16, or 80%, had had 309

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A RESPONSE TO WILLIAMS (2012) 3.5 years or less of ASL immersion at school (Andrews, Gentry, & Jackson, 2012). The Alabama study also aims to address the complex and controversial issues of sign bilingualism (Grosjean, 2008, 2010) and secondlanguage learning for deaf students (Nover & Andrews, 1998). To Williams’s list of adapted interventions, I add data-driven interventions such as shared book reading, the reciprocal teaching procedure, “think-aloud” and protocol analyses, the cloze procedure, building comprehension with story summaries, providing storybook reading for pleasure, and during teacher storybook read-alouds in ASL followed by student shared book reading, story reciting, and drawing and writing. Based on my observations of signing deaf children and youths, it appeared that they were thinking about, and talking about, texts using their signs, fingerspelling, and in some instances speech and speechreading. Thus, the cognitive-social interactive theories of reading in the 1970s to the 1990s were useful in understanding deaf children’s reading development. In the past 10 years, reading scholars have shifted their attention from strategy instruction to student-to-student and teacher-to-student discourse about texts during classroom literacy lessons (see Anderson, 1995, cited in Flippo, 2012, p. 19). Reading researchers are now cautioning against too much focus on strategy instruction. For instance, Pearson underscored that strategy instruction may not be as effective as conventional discussions in the reading classroom that are based on content knowledge (cited in Flippo, 2012, p. 317). This is reiterated by Zang and Anderson, cited in Flippo (2012, p. 308), who have said, “The most important positive finding of the past decade is the

persuasive evidence about the importance of stimulating classroom talk.” More research is needed to specify procedures in vocabulary teaching embedded in storybook reading and the development of classroom talk among deaf children in the reading classroom, whether they are monolingual users of oral English, bilingual/ bimodal language users, or ASL/ English bilingual language users. Given that many deaf students—old and young—often lack proficiency in sign language as well as oral English, it will be a challenge for teachers to develop stimulating student-to-student and teacher-to-student classroom talk about texts. Storybook Read-Alouds My second point of this commentary relates to the popular practice of teacher storybook read-alouds. (Parent storybook read-alouds are not included in this commentary.) A storybook read-aloud can be simply for enjoyment, or it can be used for instructional purposes with explicit learning objectives (Au, Mason, & Scheu, 1995). Essentially, the teacher selects a written text, such as a popular storybook, and reads it aloud to children in the classroom. Reading aloud to children is considered so important that it received attention from the National Commission on Reading, which issued a report in the 1980s titled Becoming a Nation of Readers (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985). The report’s authors stated that “the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children” (p. 23). Further, they reported that the commission had found evidence to support the use of reading aloud not only in the home 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 teachers read to preschoolers in the classroom and having parents read to them in the home has not been accepted uncritically (see, e.g., a critical review by Scarborough & Dobrich, 1994), such activity has nonetheless been recognized as a valuable tool for teachers and parents. For example, Dunning, Mason and Stewart (1994) have written, The influence of shared book reading on children’s literacy achievement has perhaps been overstated. Nevertheless, it is a valuable member of a constellation of home literacy experiences, which influence schoolrelated literacy achievement, and . . . merits further attention. (p. 337)

About the same time that the debate over shared book-reading was occurring among reading scholars, in deaf education we were having a similar debate on the efficacy of storybook read-alouds for deaf children. We discussed the differences between readalouds for hearing children and those for deaf children with the teachers who worked on the Star Schools project (1998–2002) in Santa Fe, NM. Stephen Nover, a sociolinguist, led the ASL/English Bilingual project (also called the Star Schools or CAEBER project, CAEBER being an acronym for Center for American Sign Language and English Education and Research). This was a major language teaching reform movement designed to engage inservice and preservice teachers by forming study groups that would read widely in the bilingual and literacy theory and practice literature. Following their readings and reflections on guided questions provided

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by the research team, the teachers met regularly at their home schools and again in groups of schools in Santa Fe at the New Mexico School for the Deaf for discussion of how to adapt bilingual practices for use with deaf children, using ASL and English (Nover & Andrews, 1998). One notion that stimulated discussion was the use of the storybook read-aloud with deaf students (see Nover & Andrews, 1998, pp. 60–65, for a complete description). Readers interested in learning more about the Star Schools project can access five reports at http://www .gallaudet.edu/CCS/LPI_and_CAEBER/ Resources.html. Basing our discussion on our reading of Trelease (1994) and Fountas and Pinnell (1996), we talked about how read-alouds constituted a different experience for hearing children than for signing deaf children. For example, for hearing children, read-alouds can condition the child to associate reading with pleasure. They can create background knowledge, activate new schema, and reactivate old schema or ways to mentally organize knowledge. They provide an adult reading role model for English with correct phrasing and fluency. They engage children in different aspects of book sharing and provide children with new bookreading experiences. Concepts about print, vocabulary, and syntax; familiarity with different styles of authors; appreciation of different texts; and motivation to read stories independently are other benefits of read-alouds. They also help children develop a sense of story and a knowledge of how texts are structured, and expand their linguistic abilities. Read-alouds makes complex ideas available to students and help promote oral language development. They can also serve as a basis for follow-up writing activities (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996; Trelease, 1994).

We also discussed how read-alouds are not always easy for all hearing children. The pronunciation of syllable structure in a particular dialect can be very different than it is in books printed in American English. This may confuse children, especially if they are using another dialect of English such as Black English Vernacular or Appalachian English. In addition to exhibiting dialectal differences, spoken language generally does not always mirror print. Children may become confused about the silent “e” form in written language. In words such as skated and walked, the sound “-ed” is produced in different ways; that is, “ed” makes a “t” sound in walked. The point here is that English has phonetic inconsistencies that are not always accessible through written texts. On the basis of our reading of the literature and our observations of teachers in the classroom, we discussed how read-alouds in ASL differ significantly from read-alouds in English with hearing children because the latter tap into different linguistic resources. This is not to say that read-alouds are not beneficial to deaf children (for a discussion of this issue, see, e.g., Erting & Pfau, 1997; Hayes & Shaw, 1997; Livingston & Collins, 1994; Mather, 1989; 1996; Schleper, 1997). They are beneficial, but for other reasons related to ASL learning. One difference is that storybook read-alouds do not provide deaf students with the English role model experienced by hearing children. For instance, English-text-to-ASL signing by teachers does not provide the phonological, semantic, morphemic, syntactic, and pragmatic aspects that read-alouds in English provide hearing children. English is a linear and sequential language, while the grammatical structures of ASL use move-

ment and space as well as facial expressions, raised eyebrows, head tilts, shoulder shifts, and mouth movements to show grammatical meaning (Valli & Lucas, 2000). And because of these fundamental differences between the two languages, teachers cannot assume that the “English-textto-ASL-signing strategy” will be sufficient to teach reading skills to deaf children (Nover & Andrews, 1998). The skilled teacher of reading must make the necessary bridges between the two languages, and this is where bilingual training in language-handling techniques comes in. (Interpreters know these techniques and use many of them in their work with deaf consumers, but not necessarily in teaching reading.) In our Alabama Project group reading sessions, we are observing teachers signing a story in ASL, then returning to an enlarged version of the storybook (Big Book) in English and fingerscanning the print (Gallimore, 1999), explaining the English words and phrases using ASL and fingerspelling and writing on the whiteboard. (According to Gallimore, 1999, when teachers fingerscan the print, this action signals to the deaf child that a translation is about to take place from ASL to English.) Teachers are using ASL as a semantic bridge, and ASL, fingerspelling, and writing as tools to analyze English print (see also Nover & Andrews, 1998, p. 62). The teachers are using both languages to help the child get meaning from English print. Instead of read-alouds, we suggest the term storysigning for deaf children (Nover & Andrews, 1998). The storysigning function presents concepts, plot, characters, setting, and other elements of stories to deaf students in ASL (see, e.g., Bahan, 1992; Byrne, 1996; Mather, 1989, 1996). Through storysigning, the signer can

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A RESPONSE TO WILLIAMS (2012) model the use of books, which will increase the child’s interest in them (Schleper, 1997). For example, ASL storysigning conditions the child to associate signing with pleasure, not reading English. They increase the deaf students’ background knowledge through ASL. This activity provide a fluent ASL role model. ASL storysigning engages children in different aspects of sharing stories through ASL. Further, it provides children with ASL experiences they do not receive at home. ASL storysigning allows children to develop concepts about ASL signs, expand their ASL vocabulary, learn about syntax, become familiar with signing styles, develop appreciation of different types of ASL stories, and become motivated to sign stories themselves. ASL storysigning helps children understand the purposes of storysigning. Children can develop a sense of story in ASL. Storysigning can also help make complex ideas in ASL available to the child. It can promote ASL development, and establish a language bridge by providing ideas in ASL that children can link to another language, such as English (Nover & Andrews, 1998). Storysigning can be provided for enjoyment and concept development through ASL. However, if the purpose of storysigning is to teach English reading, then the teacher must lead the child into reading the English equivalent text. The lesson must be followed up with line-by-line explanations in how the English language is meaningful. In our Alabama project, we have observed the teachers using two kinds of read-alouds. One kind is for enjoyment. For instance, the kindergarten teacher signed The Hungry Caterpillar in ASL, and followed up the reading with art activities. In the third grade, the teacher read The New

Kid From the Black Lagoon, a chapter book. This book was signed in ASL, and the children viewed it for enjoyment. A rich discussion of the ideas and characters followed. We are using storybooks for instructional purposes in our Alabama program. The simple nature of the books allows the teacher to go through each book line by line and explain the meanings of the vocabulary and of the phrase and sentence grammar. These are storybook read-alouds, or storysigning for instructional purposes, which children also enjoy. Drawing and Writing My third aim in the present article relates to storybook reading followed up with drawing and writing. Deaf children’s reading and writing are parts of their language system that interact with and support each other. Studies of emergent writing have consistently reported on the interrelationships between writing and reading (Clay, 1975; Mason, 1989; Teale & Sulzby, 1986; Yaden & Tardibuona, 2012). In the act of writing, children are thinking of ideas and composing. They are demonstrating what they know about print-related concepts such as directing print from left to right, forming and sequencing letters, using capital letters and lowercase letters, and spelling words (Clay, 1975). In addition, they are using their thinking, creativity, and imagination (Kress, 1997).

The Deaf Child’s First Vocabulary Word Typically, the first vocabulary word deaf children attempt to read and write is their first name. In our current Alabama study, in order to get to know our 25 participants, we asked them during the pretest in August to draw a self-portrait, fingerspell their name, write their name, write another name,

and write a letter and a word. These were prereading tasks we had adapted from longitudinal studies with hearing children in nursery school (Mason, 1980). When they were given the freedom to draw, write, and sign back to us about themselves, we were pulled in their personal worlds. We also learned what print concepts they knew along the emergent literacy continuum. Because of privacy considerations, only the writing of the children’s names can be described here. Of our 5 pre-K and kindergarten children, only one could not fingerspell or print her name. When asked to write her name, she wrote a continuous and connected line of wavy scribbles. This child also had a visual impairment, and was a transfer student from a public preschool. All the other preschool/ kindergarten children not only could write their names, they also began them with a capital letter when writing them. Of our 8 children in first grade, all could print their name. Most used a combination of capital and lowercase letters. All 10 children in the second and third grades started their names with capital letters followed by lowercase letters. All 25 children were demonstrating the genesis of vocabulary word learning in the fingerspelling and printing of their first names as labels for their self-portraits. Using fingerspelling and writing, they were putting together letters to form the English word, that is, their first name. After the children drew their selfportraits and labeled them with their names, we asked them to talk about their pictures. Most of the children’s stories centered on family and friends. The children signed to us their interpretation of their drawings. One boy pictured himself shooting basketball hoops. Another boy drew himself next to a coop labeled “chicken” and told

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us his father had a chicken farm. A girl’s picture showed the inside of her mouth, where she had just lost a tooth. Another girl drew herself next to her favorite flower. Another girl drew herself next to her playhouse, while another drew herself next to her pet dog. One girl drew herself with a crown on her head and dressed in a long gown and labeled herself “King Woman.” One of the boys drew himself standing beside a goalpost holding a football, with two friends shown nearby. We interpreted these drawings and name labels as the beginning of stories about the students’ identity, interests, inner symbolic worlds, and early attempts to construct meaning (Kress, 1997). The children’s drawings provided the context for printing their names (Andrews et al., 2012).

Some Benefits of Drawing and Writing Drawing and writing allow the child to show how he or she comprehends meaning from a story even at the emergent literacy level. We have added drawing and writing to our 20 storybook reading sessions. The drawing and writing events not only give children another opportunity to express parts of their comprehension of the storybook but an avenue to express their enjoyment, imagination, and creativity goals that every teacher wants to help them fulfill, even if they are not the skills measurable by standardized state tests and state curricula! Suggestions Based on Williams’s invited essay and the commentary by Paul (2012), I offer four suggestions. First, Williams’s seven vocabulary interventions with storybook readings constitute potential studies that can be designed and tested with deaf students.

Second, longitudinal designs could be used to explore developmental patterns of children’s growth in emergent and development literacy (Yaden, Rowe, & McGillivray, 2000), particularly vocabulary learning, as well as to identify word knowledge levels (Mason, Herman, & Au 1990). Third, while multiparadigmatic science is “desirable and should be permitted” that allows all paradigms to be freely used to explore practical problems in deaf education (Paul & Moores, 2010, p. 427), researchers should consider designing studies that specifically utilize the paradigm of “Deaf epistemology” (or Deaf ways of knowing) in the teaching of reading. Certainly, as Wang (2010) points out, “standard epistemologies” of reading methods designed for hearing children do have a place in deaf education reading instruction. My discussion above of using adaptations for deaf children that are originally designed for hearing students concurs with Wang’s point of view. However, I recommend that the field broaden its theoretical and practical lens to also include “deaf epistemologies” in reading instruction because this area represents a virtually unexplored and fertile ground for future literacy research for deaf children. Fourth, proponents of the ASL/ English bilingual approach to teaching reading would benefit from developing more rigorous descriptions and strategies for code emphasis strategies using signing, fingerspelling (S. Baker, 2010; Ausbrooks-Rusher, Schimmel, & Edwards, in press), and writing. As such, these reading strategies use “indigenous practices of the deaf community” (Humphries, 2004). Furthermore, lessons can be developed that tap into other linguistic aspects of ASL such as the use of handshapes (Crume, 2012) and handshape rhymes and stories (Smith & Ja-

cobowitz, 2005; Snodden, 2011). However, one must keep in mind that using the linguistic features of ASL is teaching ASL, not English reading. And for English reading instruction to take place, the skilled teacher of reading must make the appropriate strategies for bridging from ASL to English and English to ASL (Nover & Andrews, 1998; Simms, Andrews & Smith, 2005). These ASL/English bilingual strategies for reading English need to be tested empirically with large groups of signing deaf children. To measure these strategies effectively, valid and reliable measurement tools need to be developed as well. We cannot assume that signing stories is sufficient to teach reading. But ASL discourse through storysigning can lay the conceptual groundwork and allow for rich classroom discussions about how English texts work if the appropriate followup English reading instruction is carried out. Closing Words More research is needed to investigate alternative visual strategies for teaching reading to deaf children with cochlear implants using whole stories rather 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 implantation, the very best surgical outcomes, and the best parental and professional training and support, still do not develop spoken language and emergent literacy skills as hearing children do (Carden, 2008). When deaf children fail to thrive linguistically in spoken language, they are introduced to sign language late in the language acquisition process (past age 4 years). Much as they struggle to learn to speak, deaf children with cochlear implants also struggle to learn sign lan313

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Note 1. The term double-semilingual refers to a child who has failed to develop proficiency in both of two languages (C. Baker & Jones, 1998). He or she has underdeveloped vocabulary and grammar and cannot express ideas and feelings using either language. This term has received much criticism from bilingual researchers because it blames the victim (the child) for not acquiring language instead of blaming the language-impoverished environment the child is in (C. Baker & Jones, 1998, p. 14).

guage, and this has an impact on their future acquisition of sign language (Emmorey, 2002; Mayberry, 1993, 1998). In effect, in early childhood education we are setting up “doublesemilingual environments”1 where children are developing neither spoken nor sign language at a rate they could if language-rich (English and ASL) environments were set up much like those enjoyed by hearing children and deaf children of deaf parents (Andrews, Logan, & Phelan, 2008). Clearly, signing deaf children with or without cochlear implants are at risk when it comes to learning to read and write, and are in need of multiple innovative reading instructional techniques aimed at creating opportunities for them to read, enjoy, and discuss connected English discourse. And Williams’s review of the literature of adapted vocabulary instruction combined with storybook reading, and Paul’s (2012) encouragement of teachers to develop in all deaf children a deep curiosity about words and a sense of word consciousness, have provided the field with a fresh place to start.

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