The Benefit of Assessment-Based Language and Reading Instruction ...

The Benefit of Assessment-Based Language and Reading Instruction: Perspectives From a Case Study Diane Corcoran Nielsen University of Kansas Barbara Luetke-Stahlman

We present a case study of the language and literacy development of a deaf child, Marcy, from preschool through sixth grade. The purpose of the project was to examine the connection between language and reading and to provide insight into the relationships between them. To compile the case study, we analyzed data from nine years of follow-up, including listening, speech articulation, semantic, syntactic, reading, and writing information drawn from a number of informal and formal assessments. Annual evaluation of language and literacy skills was used to select educational placements, as well as instructional methods, strategies, and materials. Given that Marcy began school at 4 years of age, mute and without expressive language of any form (oral or sign), it may at first appear remarkable that she read narrative and expository text as did her hearing peers by sixth grade, because a substantial body of research shows that most deaf students read at the fourth-grade level by high school graduation (review by Paul, 1998). However, those responsible for Marcy’s education prevented reading failure by carefully planning, instituting, and monitoring elements of language and literacy instruction. We present Marcy’s progress and instruction by grade level and discuss it within the framework of phases/ stages of reading development. We hope that the resulting case study may serve as an example of the language-reading connection, an awareness important not only for the literacy instruction of deaf and language-challenged children but for hearing students as well.

The language and reading abilities and challenges of a deaf child may at first appear different from those of a hearing child. But we have learned in our work toCorrespondence should be sent to Diane Corcoran Nielsen, Department of Teaching and Leadership, 446 J. R. Pearson Hall, 1122 West Campus Road, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045-3101 (e-mail: dnielsen@ ku.edu). 2002 Oxford University Press

gether that when students live in the inner city, have special learning needs, or have a hearing loss, they often share the challenge of learning English—not informal, routine, daily English, but the decontexualized language required to comprehend and express the thinking skills required in school. In this case study, we have tried to detail the important aspects of the life of a deaf child, Marcy, as she moves through the stages of developing into a proficient reader, acquiring “cognitive-academic” language, as well as reading and writing proficiency. We hope to provide insight into several complex processes and relationships among them. Marcy was born in Bulgaria in December 1987 and lived in an orphanage for the first 4 years of her life. She was a deaf and mute child, communicating through mime and physical behavior. If she were unhappy or scared, she would throw a tantrum. She did not have a hearing aid or any other assistive listening device. She could not hear spoken language, nor was she provided access to it visually (sign). When Marcy was adopted in January 1992, and came to live in the United States, she had never cut with scissors, colored, or been exposed to literacy activities. Marcy moved to a suburb of a large Midwestern city with her adoptive parents. She had three older sisters, one of whom was deaf. She was enrolled in a public school program for deaf preschoolers the day after her arrival. Marcy attended the same school for the rest of that year and for a second year of preschool, as well as for kindergarten through sixth grade. As professors

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Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 7:2 Spring 2002

with different areas of expertise, deaf education, and reading, we had access to 9 years of communication and literacy data, because one of us is Marcy’s mother.

(Paul, 1998). However, this case study involved a child whose teachers and parents used English, signed exactly as they spoke it—and that is the language Marcy acquired as well.

Terminology As a deaf educator and a reading professor, we began discussing the connection between Marcy’s “oral” and written language acquisition. We realized that the meaning of some of the terminology used in the field of deaf education might differ from how the same terms are used in the field of reading. For example, in deaf education, the term “oral language” has to be distinguished from the terms of receptive and expressive language. When a child is hearing, one thinks about oral and written language as marking expressive competency, but a deaf child can be mute and demonstrate age-appropriate semantic and syntactic language abilities. Therefore, oral language or speech is identified as but one modality of expressing language. A deaf child might also communicate through sign alone (without speech) or through a combination of partially intelligible speech and sign, expressed simultaneously. Thus, via various modalities, the same use (syntactic), meaning (semantic), and form (pragmatic) aspects of language evidenced by a hearing child can be demonstrated by a deaf child. We used the term “communication” to include speech articulation, speechreading, and language use, as well as listening ability (or audition). In our work, we used the term “language” to refer to either oral or manual English. Further, we discussed basic, informal, routine language as different from decontextualized (Snow & Tabors, 1993) or cognitiveacademic language proficiency (Cummins, 1984). This language-reading connection is supported in the literature (Apel & Swank, 1999; Newcomer & Hammil, 1975; Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 1996; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Freeman, 1984; Tunmer, 1989; Tunmer & Hoover, 1992; Tunmer & Nesdale, 1985; Vogel, 1974; Warren-Leubecker, 1987). Last, in more general discussions of deaf education, there are always two possible languages to consider: American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Deaf students in the United States might have teachers who use ASL or they might be instructed in spoken or signed English. Most often, various combinations of these two languages are used

Signing a Language English was Marcy’s first language because her parents, who are hearing, communicated in English as their dominant and home language. For several reasons they chose to use a system of simultaneously spoken and signed English, called Signing Exact English, or SEE (Gustason, Zawolkow, & Pfetzing, 1973). One reason was that administrators in the school district in which the family lived decided to use this instructional input several years before the family moved to the area, and Marcy’s parents believed that her exposure to the same language at home and at school would benefit her as she acquired a first language (Luetke-Stahlman, 1988, 1990). In addition, Marcy’s parents were already using SEE with their older deaf daughter, and they wanted to use the same sign system with Marcy. School administrators of the deaf education program in which Marcy was enrolled and her parents were aware of studies that reported the literacy benefit of using SEE (see review by Luetke-Stahlman, 1993). Those at school valued the use of SEE, attempted to sign English grammar accurately, and were supervised and evaluated as to their proficiency (Mayer & Lowenbraum, 1990). Teachers and interpreters were rated by a state evaluation system, and those working with Marcy had earned the highest SEE rating. Thus, both professionals at school and Marcy’s family members attempted to accurately represent the morphology and syntax of English. SEE is the only instructional manual input in which this is possible. SEE was designed to represent the grammar of English in several ways (Gustason et al., 1973). First, different signs are used to represent root words so that the various pronouns, contractions, and verb forms are distinguished visually as different words. (e.g., “tree,” “woods,” “forest,” “orchard,” and “jungle”). The SEE system also includes signs that are added to root words or base signs so that inflections and derivations are produced. In a similar manner, other parts of language such as nominative and adjectival forms can be distin-

Assessment-Based Language and Reading Instruction

guished. For example, the words electric, electrician, electrical, electricity are all signed using different combinations of signs in SEE, but not in other manual systems. Given the empirically substantiated relationship between English and reading found with hearing children (Adams, 1990; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Tunmer & Hoover, 1992), it seems obvious that the reading achievement of deaf children would be adversely affected if parents and teachers did not communicate using grammatically accurate models of English syntax that children can comprehend (Paul & Quigley, 1994). As expected, researchers in deaf education have found that better English grammar knowledge is correlated with higher reading achievement (see Babb, 1979; Brasal & Quigley, 1977; Luetke-Stahlman, 1988, 1990; Moeller & Johnson, 1988; Moores & Sweet, 1990). For example, Luetke-Stahlman (1988, 1990) reported that first- and second-grade deaf students who were exposed to SEE read significantly better than deaf subjects who used speech-only, ASL, or other invented English sign systems in which the grammar of English was only partially provided. There is no research that documents age-appropriate reading achievement of deaf students who are instructed only in ASL (see review by Paul, 1998).

Data Collection When Marcy first entered preschool, the teacher of the deaf and the speech-language pathologist conducted an informal assessment of her language skills and an educational team drafted an Individualized Educational Plan (IEP). The federal Individual with Disabilities Education Act requires that such evaluation and planning be conducted at least annually. In the following years, data were collected from a number of informal and formal sources and used to guide discussion at Marcy’s annual IEP meetings. Then goals and objectives were written, from which lesson plans were drafted. Formal testing was conducted by both local school personnel and researchers associated with a cochlear implant project at Indiana University, Otologic Research Laboratory. Because Marcy was deaf, many more listening, speech, language, and literacy measures were administered to her throughout the elementary years than

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typically are administered to hearing children or to children with special needs. (See Appendix 1 for descriptions of these tests.) Her parents, case manager, and the special education director kept copies of Marcy’s IEPs, including annual language and literacy assessment summaries. The speech language pathologist at her school kept actual test protocols. Informal assessments were kept by her mother and included copies of notes from observations, checklists, tests taken in various school subjects, writing samples, videotaped language and literacy samples, videotaped lessons, and other such information. In addition to informal assessment, Marcy’s educational team deliberately chose to use tests that had been standardized on hearing children to assess her language and literacy progress. This was in part because they could not locate standardized tools recently normed on deaf students; most were standardized 25–30 years ago. The students sampled primarily used ASL, PSE (which constitutes conceptual ASL signs sequenced in English word order and is also called contact-signing), neither of which were the instructional language to which Marcy was exposed. The deaf children in the samples had attended residential or large day programs, segregated from hearing peers, and this was not representative of Marcy’s school programming. Instead, her situation resembled that of 80% of deaf students today (Moores, 1999): Marcy attended public school and was one of only a few students who were deaf or hard of hearing in her classroom or grade. Her work was compared daily to that of hearing students. Currently, most deaf students in the United States are taught by general education teachers, with or without the services of an interpreter or consultation by a teacher of the deaf. For these reasons, educational teams routinely administer standardized tests used by the school district to assess all students with special needs.

Results To analyze and discuss the connections between Marcy’s language and literacy development, we first organized informal and formal information in a chronology of files by date. For standardized test score data, we independently located scores by year, compared our fig-

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ures, and rechecked the original test protocols if there were discrepancies. We then converted each score to a percentile (coded as percentile) using the test administration information. Thirty percent of these figures were converted independently from raw scores to percentiles by a professor in special education. There were no discrepancies between his conversions and ours. We used percentile data because we thought most readers were familiar with them (Bender, 1999) and because the various tests in the study employed different types of scoring systems. Two measures, listening and speech articulation, were converted to percentages because percentile scores were not available. After converting the scores, we organized them into tables. The speech and listening development data are presented by year in Table 1. Receptive and expressive language data for Marcy’s kindergarten year are provided in Table 2; Table 3 presents first-grade linguistic and reading data, second-grade linguistic and reading data in Table 4 and so forth through sixthgrade data in Table 8. Data from the district curriculum-based reading assessments, collected over the years, is presented in Table 9. Data in Tables 2 through 8 were divided into five columns each, based on a categorization scheme that reflects typical interpretation of a normal distribution curve. A 2nd–15th percentile score falls within two standard deviations below the mean and was considered below average. A 16th–49th percentile score fell within one standard derivation below the mean and was referred to as low average. A score at the 50th percentile was average. A 51st–84th percentile score fell within one standard derivation above the mean and was considered high average. An 85th–98th percentile score fell within two standard deviations above the mean and was considered above average. In this article, we referred to these categories rather than test scores, unless we thought that specific scores helped to illustrate a particular point. Exact test scores are located on the tables for the interested reader, with the exception that the linguistic data collected in the preschool years is presented within the text of the article. This is because there were only two tests given in those years. When the tables were complete, we began to integrate our review of the literature, annual descriptions

of Marcy’s school experience, and the informal (videotapes, school papers, etc.) and formal information collected each year. To make the case study readable, we chose to include information that exemplified the predominant language and literacy connections, which we supported with results from our review of the literature. We typically presented this information in a sequence that included a description of relevant activities at home and then the characteristics of the school program. We ordered academic data by first discussing listening and speech-articulation progress and then language and literacy information. Receptive semantic language data were usually presented before receptive syntactic data; expressive semantic data before expressive syntactic data. The literacy data were sequenced to include reading, spelling, and writing information.

The Preschool Years: Access to Language and Literacy Initial audiometric testing indicated that Marcy had a profound bilateral, sensorineural, unaided hearing loss. That is, she could not hear an airplane flying overhead, let alone human speech. She was fitted with hearing aids soon after her arrival in the United States and wore them daily for 3 months. Aided audiometric data collected during this time illustrated that the hearing aids only minimally improved her ability to detect sound (i.e., 250 Hz at 60 dB and 500 Hz at 75 dB). In short, Marcy could not hear any sounds in the English speech spectrum even while wearing hearing aids. Marcy was immersed as an observer and participant of simultaneously voiced and signed conversations upon her adoption. Teaching some vocabulary was simply a matter of providing Marcy with sign labels for concepts she already knew (e.g., she learned the basic signs for colors in one afternoon), but most aspects of language were much slower to develop and resulted at times in stimulus-response interactions. For example, a videotaped language sample taken shortly after her arrival shows Marcy eating breakfast beside her older deaf sister. The sister competently models responses to routine breakfast queries from their mother. However, when it is Marcy’s turn to request a bowl, then cereal, and finally milk, she imitates the sign WANT as if she does not yet understand the linguistic significance of

Initially mute.

Speech development

Articulated single, highly visible phonemes; in isolation, in a series.

Learn to detect when sound was present or not.

Preschool 2 1993 5:1

Expressive English

Receptive English

ASSETT ⫽ bn PPVT ⫽ 5 percentile CELF Concepts & directions ⫽ 9th percentile Sentence structure ⫽ 16th percentile LPT Multiple Meanings – bn Attributes ⫽ bn LPT total ⫽ 11th percentile

Below average 2–15th percentile

Kindergarten (6:1 years of age)

4:0 – 4:3 Tried hearing aid, could not hear speech. 4:6 Received cochlear implant.

Listening development

Table 2

Preschool 1 1992 4:1

Speech and listening development

Grade Year Age in January

Table 1

Expressive One Word Vocabulary Test ⫽ 48th percentile

Low average 16–49th percentile

Could discriminate: bababa/tatata; loud/soft sounds; long/short sounds; one phoneme from another with 76% accuracy; comprehended simple requests in context; 75% correct on minimal pairs test. Articulated phonemes in initial positions; 10% on the Goldman-Fristoe Articulation Test; could not produce /g/, /k/, /gn/, /r/.

K 1994 6:1

Average 50th percentile

96% on the Ling Speech Evaluation; 51% on GoldmanFristoe Articulation Test; speech was intelligible 50% in informal conversation.

Highly similar two-and three-syllable phonemes sounded alike.

1 1995 7:1 Began weekly cello lesson in 3rd grade.

3–4 1997 and 1998 9:1 and 10:1

Above average 85–98th percentile

In 5th grade, speech was comprehensible 75% of the time for both narrative and expository topics.

Joined the school orchestra in 5th grade and continued in 6th grade.

5–6 1999 and 2000 11:1 and 12:1

LPT Similarities ⫽ 58th percentile Differences ⫽ 68th percentile Associations ⫽ 74th percentile Categories ⫽ 76th percentile

High average 51–84th percentile

71% on the GoldmanFristoe Articulation Test; trouble articulating second syllable of twosyllable words.

Could not differentiate words that differed in place like fab and fall. Listening ability affected spelling of within word patterns.

2 1996 8:1

Reading Vocabulary: Gates-MacGinitie Comprehension: Gates-MacGinitie Woodcock-Johnson

Expressive English

TOLDGrammatical Understanding ⫽ 25th percentile Expressive One Word Vocabulary Test ⫽ 19th percentile LPTSimilarities ⫽ 20th percentile Categories ⫽ 23rd percentile TOLDWord Articulation ⫽ 37th percentile LPT total ⫽ 41st percentile LPT Associations ⫽ 43rd percentile

PPVT ⫽ 2nd percentile TOLDPicture Vocabulary ⫽ 9th percentile TOLDSentence Imitation ⫽ bn; Defining Vocabulary ⫽ 5th percentile; Grammatical Completion ⫽ 9th percentile LPTMultiple Meanings ⫽ 15th percentile

40th percentile

43rd percentile


34th percentile

33rd percentile


Second grade (8:1 years of age)

Receptive English

Table 4

Reading Vocabulary: Gates-MacGinitie Comprehension: Gates-MacGinitie

Expressive English


ASSETT Total ⫽ 4th percentile PPVT ⫽ 18th percentile CELF-Oral Directions ⫽ 5th percentile CELF-Sentence Structure ⫽ 9th percentile ASSETT Total ⫽ 9th percentile Expressive One Word Vocabulary Test ⫽ 34th percentile


First grade (7:1 years of age)

Receptive English

Table 3

CELFSentence Structure ⫽ 50th percentile



LPTDifferences ⫽ 51st percentile Attributes ⫽ 62nd percentile



88th percentile



Reading Vocabulary: Gates-MacGinitie WoodcockRead. Mastery Comprehension: WoodcockRead. Mastery Gates-MacGinitie

13th percentile CELFFormulating Sentences ⫽ 4th percentile


Fourth grade (10:1 years of age)

Receptive English OWLS Expressive English

Table 6

20th percentile 62nd percentile

21st percentile 16th percentile

LPTSimilarities ⫽ 26th percentile Associations ⫽ 39th percentile Multiple Meanings ⫽ 40th percentile Attributes ⫽ 42nd percentile Total LPT ⫽ 44th percentile Categories ⫽ 49th percentile

PPVT ⫽ 20th percentile


47th percentile 39th percentile

21st percentile 27th percentile



High average Above average 51–84th percentile 85–98th percentile

LPTDifferences ⫽ 66th percentile


CELFWord Classes ⫽ 37th percentile Word Structure ⫽ 37th percentile

Expressive English

Reading Vocabulary Gates-MacGinitie ITBS Comprehension Gates-MacGinitie ITBS

CELFSentence Structure ⫽ 50th percentile

PPVT ⫽ 20th percentile

Receptive English

CELFRecalling Sentences ⫽ 1st percentile Formulating Sentences ⫽ 2nd percentile



Third grade (9:1 years of age) Low average 16–49th percentile

Table 5

Reading Vocabulary ITBS WoodcockRead. Mastery Comprehension WoodcockRead. Mastery ITBS


Sixth grade (12:1 years of age)

Receptive English OWLS Expressive English

Table 8

Reading Vocabulary Gates-MacGinitie Woodcock Read. Mastery Comprehension Woodcock Read. Mastery Gates-MacGinitie

LPTSimilarities ⫽ 7th percentile Differences ⫽ 13th percentile


Fifth grade (11:1 years of age)

Receptive English Expressive English

Table 7

24th percentile

50th percentile


CELFWord Classes ⫽ 50th percentile


16th percentile LPTAssociations ⫽ 39th percentile Similarities ⫽ 26th percentile Multiple Meanings ⫽ 40th percentile Attributes ⫽ 42nd percentile Total LPT ⫽ 44th percentile Categorizations ⫽ 49th percentile


35th percentile 25th percentile

PPVT ⫽ 25th percentile CELFFormulating Sentences ⫽ 16th percentile LPTCategories ⫽ 23rd percentile Multiple Meanings ⫽ 23rd percentile Associations ⫽ 32nd percentile


65th percentile

59th percentile

LPTDifferences ⫽ 66th percentile


57th percentile 63rd percentile

LPT total score ⫽ 56th percentile



LPTAttributes ⫽ 89th percentile



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Table 9 District curriculum-based assessment (CBA) Grade Year Age Narrative Midyear End-year Expository Midyear End-year

1 1995 7:1 years

2 1996 8:1 years

3 1997 9:1 years

4 1998 10:1 years

5 1999 11:1 years

6 2000 12:1 years

80% (SP) 50% (SP)

60% (SP) 80% (SP)

na

na

SP Specific scores: na

100% (SP) 80% (SP)

37% (FDN) 20% (FDN)

80% (SP) 33% (FDN)

na

na

SP Specific scores: na

79% (PR) 87% (SP)

FDN ⫽ further development needed; SP ⫽ strong performer; PR ⫽ progressing reader; na ⫽ not available.

making a more specific sign-gesture. Reminiscent of episodes with Helen Keller before the scene at the water pump, Marcy dutifully imitates the sign, her arms and hands awkwardly moving as a unit rather than as the articulators of words. Copeland, Winsor, and Osborn (1994) explained that typically, “children’s prior knowledge as speakers of English can be brought to bear as they master its alphabetic system” (p. 28). That is, as they learn to speak, children internalize how sounds can be systematically combined to form words. In addition, they learn about semantics and syntax, or how words can be appropriately used linguistically in phrases and sentences. This knowledge is normally acquired in the preschool years (Copeland et al., 1994). In contrast, the majority of deaf children begin to learn to read without linguistic competence (Paul, 1998). That is, they often cannot articulate speech in an intelligible manner, nor can they comprehend and express English. Marcy could not either. In fact, she began school as a profoundly deaf-mute who was alingual. Thus, her situation was not a question of transitioning from Bulgarian to English, but instead of acquiring a first language through “accessible” social interaction. Slowly but surely, however, Marcy began to learn basic vocabulary and grammar just as a hearing toddler begins to develop spoken language—reinforced by the social context and the power of learning to use language to get what she wanted. Adults employed standard language facilitation strategies that included paraphrasing, maintenance of the topic, expansions, building on routines, and so forth, to facilitate Marcy’s language development (Luetke-Stahlman, 1998). In ad-

dition to receiving daily instruction from a teacher of the deaf, who was trained to intentionally facilitate language and literacy abilities, Marcy received 30 minutes of therapy daily from a speech-language pathologist who was experienced in working with deaf children. In February 1992, having been exposed to English for a month, Marcy’s limited language understanding was evident when she described a picture as “red language.” Her formal signs were frequently interspersed with mime, facial expressions, and gestures, as this is how she communicated before she was adopted. At 4.7 years of age, four months later, Marcy was given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) to try to document her receptive vocabulary knowledge. She scored in the low average range (35th percentile), a score we feel does not accurately portray her struggle to acquire language. Research is available to support our concern. White and Tischer (1999) described possible threats to the construct validity of receptive vocabulary tests such as the PPVT when used to evaluate deaf children. This is “because of the prevalence of iconicity of the signs used to encode the vocabulary” (p. 338). For example, to ask a child, “Where is the picture of ‘a thumb’?,” the tester points to his or her own thumb when signing the word “THUMB.” We believe that this factor, as well as the high percentage of nouns included on the first part of the test, enabled Marcy to receive a score that was an inflation of her overall vocabulary ability. Marcy had cochlear implant surgery in May l992, near the end of her first five months of preschool. Twenty-two electrodes were surgically threaded into the cochlea of her right inner ear, which sent an artificial sound signal through the electrodes and eighth

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nerve to her brain when simulated by a processor worn externally. Marcy wore her cochlear implant equipment daily, and over the course of that first summer, she began to make connections between hearing, speech, and SEE signs. The implant did not allow her to hear normally, however. She had to “learn to listen,” or, in other words, her brain had to learn to process the sounds stimulating it. In addition, Marcy had to integrate speech sounds with the language she was acquiring. To help develop her simultaneously spoken and signed language ability, Marcy was introduced to many new experiences. Upon her arrival in the United States, Marcy had never experienced a family, a birthday, or a book, or the hundreds of other objects, events, and processes about which stories and informational texts are written. Thus, from the onset, communication and literacy were integrated in her life. She was read to by proficient readers who could sign SEE, she was introduced to books at home, and she frequented the public and school libraries. She also went with her family on many local trips (e.g., zoo, farm, fire station) and family vacations, planned so she could experience such concepts as “a mountain” and “an ocean.” Marcy’s college-educated parents and three older sisters enjoyed reading, discussing ideas, arguing their point of view, writing for formal and informal reasons, and playing a variety of board games that required language use or reading abilities. Their home was rich with opportunities to value and enjoy literacy. Numerous reading and writing materials were accessible to Marcy, as were two computers. Her grandmother printed frequent letters to her. Videotaped samples document that books were routinely placed in a clear recipe holder on the kitchen table near Marcy. These were usually children’s concept books, with pictures and labels grouped by category. Family members would label and discuss these in SEE when there was a lull in the mealtime conversation. The family also routinely corresponded through written messages, such as notes of who was where and a list of needed foods on the refrigerator. Videotapes of signed stories that Marcy enjoyed were each labeled with stickers and printed titles. Two dresser drawers in her room were labeled: “school clothes” and “play clothes” so that she could dress more independently.

Marcy also was surrounded by some literacy stimulation not common in hearing homes. This was because her deaf sister often used the TDD, a special telephone for the deaf, on which conversation that would be typically heard appeared as printed text across a small screen on the device. Marcy often watched as her sister typed and read on the TDD. In addition, the family used the captioner on their television frequently, which made text visible at the bottom of the screen when anyone spoke during a program. The literacy activities in which Marcy was immersed were reflective of wholelanguage approaches that Stahl (1994) found produced significantly higher literacy achievement at the kindergarten level than did basal reading program approaches. Marcy’s engagement in such activities also supported Chall’s (1983) notion of stage theory, which says that decoding words is preceded by an awareness of the functions of print and later to an awareness of its form.

The Preschool Years Continued: An Orientation to Print and How it Functions Like hearing, preschool-age children of this age, Marcy’s attention was focused on “the meaning of the collective, ordered stream of words used in conversation,” as she watched and responded to requests and comments (Copeland et al., 1994, p. 29). However, the teacher of the deaf also had to plan daily lessons to engage Marcy in activities in which the “stream of words” was reduced to manageable concepts for her to notice and, therefore, acquire. For example, Marcy learned the meaning of prepositions by following directions to put objects in, on, above, or under other objects. Marcy worked daily with a speech-language pathologist and was able to reliably detect the presence of sound after having worn her cochlear implant for 3 or 4 months. She worked to articulate single phonemes that were highly visible on the mouth, such as /b/. Initially Marcy practiced phonemes in isolation, then in a series (e.g., /b/, /b/, /b/), and later in words (e.g., baa, bee, boo). A videotaped sample filmed at home about this time illustrates how family members helped Marcy acquire these rudiments of communication. In one scene, her older sister is teaching her to say, “boo” (one of her speech targets) as another sister pretends to


be surprised. They repeat the game over and over, much to Marcy’s delight—and benefit, as she practices speech sounds in a meaningful context. Although family members and the speech-language pathologist’s purpose was to improve Marcy’s speech by helping her realize that sounds are combined to form words, these activities also caused her to manipulate phonemes, which boosted her development of phonemic awareness. The teacher of the deaf facilitated emergent reading skills as well, even though Marcy did not have the awareness of phonology that would be expected of a hearing child her age. She exposed Marcy to elements common in shared reading experiences by demonstrating concepts of print, engaging in life-to-text and textto-life (Cochran-Smith, 1984) connections, and so forth. Sulzby (1985) and others suggest that interactive reading sessions between adult and child facilitate emergent reading development. Through such experiences, children begin to acquire the language of print, mimicking phrases and words from books, and are exposed to word order common in written text but not in conversation. Rare words that are atypical of the informal language used in their everyday lives can also be acquired (Beals, DeTemple, & Dickinson, 1994). Although Marcy’s world was rich with language and literacy stimulation, a conversation taken from a family videotape around her fifth birthday documents Marcy’s limitations in expressing herself. As cake is eaten, Marcy is seen signing “GIRL GOOD” with facial expression, as she attempts to converse with another deaf child. Later, when gifts are opened, Marcy signs, “HAVE,” and a few seconds later, “ONE,” as if to communicate, “I have one of these now.” She again uses facial gestures and adds a tilting of her shoulders, but it is unclear what she is trying to communicate with these actions. Marcy produces voiced sounds when she signs each of these utterances, but her words are unintelligible. Due to Marcy’s limited communicative ability in this second preschool year, little formal evaluation was conducted. When the PPVT receptive vocabulary test was given again midyear, Marcy scored below average (10th percentile), a score that seemed more valid to her educational team members than her supposed “average” performance the previous year.

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Kindergarten: A Focus on Basic, Routine Communication By kindergarten Marcy had adjusted to home life and was participating in literacy experiences. Marcy also saw her sisters, who were as much as 9 years older than she, engaged in a barrage of literacy activities. She was beginning to communicate more with her deaf 7-yearold sister, who had been assessed as signing English as a typical 7-year-old hearing child would speak it (see Table 2). A shoebox of books was now kept in each family car to entertain Marcy on errands, since she could not hear the radio or talk extensively to the driver. Her father built a shelf by her bed, so her reading materials were readily available before bedtime, and a basket was placed in the bathroom to hold additional books and magazines. That Marcy routinely engaged in an independent “reading” time before going to sleep at night enhanced her preparation for becoming a reader herself (Leslie & Allen, 1999; Mason, 1992; Snow et al., 1998). Marcy enjoyed this quiet time and was aware that other family members were in their beds reading as well. The literacy activities in Marcy’s home placed a value on reading, which has been documented to be important in furthering reading achievement. Leslie and Allen (1999) reviewed 30 years of research emphasizing the important role of family members in the literacy development of children. For example, in their study, interest in books and the valuing of literacy were related to children’s reading ability. Mason (1992) initially reported that family socioeconomic status (SES) and the availability of print in the home correlated most with reading achievement, but later identified academic guidance, attitude toward education, parent aspirations, and conversations in the home as contributing more directly to early reading achievement and accounted for more variance in reading scores than SES. Marcy’s situation reflected the findings of both of these research projects. Although she attended her neighborhood public school, Marcy was not enrolled in kindergarten with hearing children. She did, however, participate in all the nonacademic activities with her hearing peers, such as lunch and recess. Marcy was taught primarily by a

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teacher of the deaf, who worked with her in a resource room. She also continued to see the speech-language pathologist for a half hour daily. As it had been in preschool, the focus of her day was on the development of basic, routine communication. Her teacher of the deaf read many stories with her and the two of them discussed these at length. If Marcy did not understand the language used in the text, context was added. That is, real objects and pictures were provided and matched to the unfamiliar printed word, examples were given, and links were made to past experiences. For example, her teacher demonstrated and described the word “wobbly” with a real pair of high heels. Language lessons evolved around story characters and plots, and stories were sometimes chosen because the vocabulary they contained reinforced a language concept being facilitated. Marcy had excellent school attendance in kindergarten and throughout her elementary years. In kindergarten, Marcy improved her basic communication ability. She was no longer mute. She demonstrated in this year her ability to produce most phonemes in the initial position in isolated words; however, when asked to articulate initial, final, and medial phonemes of words included on the Goldman-Fristoe Articulation Test, she could produce only 10%, and all in the initial position. Even with modeling and prompting by a skilled professional, Marcy could not produce the phonemes /g/, /k/, /gn/, and /r/. A listener who was not familiar with deaf speakers could understand about half of what she was trying to say during informal conversation. Marcy’s ability to listen to speech and understand it as a form of communication also had improved in the year and a half she had worn her cochlear implant. As is typical when deaf children are being trained to listen, Marcy first learned to detect if sound was present or not, and then began to work on discriminating spoken sounds. In kindergarten, she progressed to being able to tell whether pairs of phonemes were similar or dissimilar. This was practiced in a quiet room with the speech-language pathologist, who blocked her mouth area from view so that Marcy could not speechread. Marcy was asked to listen to utterances such as “ba ba ba” versus “ba ba ba,” or “ba ba ba” versus “ta ta ta” and to tell whether the series of sounds were the same or different. She also was able to discriminate a loud

series from a soft one, a long series from a short one, and one phoneme from another (with 76% accuracy). Marcy could comprehend simple requests and comments auditorially only (without accompanying sign) in routine, context-embedded situations. For example, if she was told, “Get your pencil,” without signs, in a situation where she would expect a pencil to be needed, she understood what to do. Marcy also practiced listening to a closed set of vocabulary words taken from shared reading text. Her task was to identify which word in a group was being spoken. This was done first while only listening and then, if necessary, while listening and speechreading simultaneously. Each word was used in a sentence after it was correctly identified. The careful articulation of the sounds in words taken from her shared reading work was practiced throughout the day. Finally, Marcy often was asked to imitate the adult model of phrases that appeared in the stories read to her. Both the teacher of the deaf and the speech pathologist integrated sound/letter activities into lessons to facilitate Marcy’s knowledge of how specific sounds are linked to print. That Marcy could hear at least something of human speech, as compared to functioning as a profoundly deaf student, was important to her literacy development. Several researchers have discovered that deaf children who can hear at least some sound become better readers (Conrad, 1979; Fabbretti, Volterra, & Pontecorvo, 1998; Geers & Moog, 1989; Paul, 1998). Although Marcy’s family and the professionals who worked on her educational team immersed her in accessible language, it was not a surprise that Marcy scored below average on receptive and expressive standardized language tests she was given in preparation for her IEP in the middle of her kindergarten year. Given but 2 years of exposure to accessible language, she functioned linguistically like a hearing 2-year-old. Her score on the PPVT receptive vocabulary word test was well below average (5th percentile). With regard to acquiring decontextualized language, Marcy’s development also was delayed. Compared to hearing peers, her score was also below average on the Assessing Semantic Skills Through Everyday Themes (ASSET), also a measure of receptive semantic ability but one that requires the ability


to comprehend more complex English than the PPVT vocabulary measure. Sample items include “Show me the crayons” and “Show me some things you can string” to which the student responds while looking at several pictures (e.g., classroom, kitchen, garage). Marcy’s educational team was aware that the comprehension and expression of decontextualized or “cognitive-academic” language skill (Cummins, 1984) had been found to predict fourth-grade reading comprehension (Tabors, 1996). Therefore, they were encouraged when Marcy scored above the mean in January of her kindergarten year on subtests that measured skills targeted in her IEP and that had been facilitated during the year. Four expressive semantic tests from the Language Processing Test (LPT) targeted such skills in their assessment: Associations (74th percentile), Categorizations (76th percentile), Differences (68th percentile), Similarities (58th percentile). These measures required Marcy to give associations for words such as “shoe,” “pencil,” and “horse”; give categories (e.g., fruits, farm animals); provide examples; and tell how words like “car” and “bus” or “sink” and “bathtub” are the same or different. Marcy scored far below her hearing peers on decontextualized expressive semantic language skills that had not been priorities in her program. On the ASSETT test, she could not answer questions such as, “What are 1 . . . 3 . . . 7 . . . called ?” or “How does the slide feel?” Marcy could not explain the multiple meanings for words such as “trip” after listening to sentences such as “The class is taking a field trip,” and “Don’t trip on the rug,” nor could Marcy give attributes of words like “pencil” and “desk” categorized along the dimensions of function, components, color, size, shape, category, location, and so on. These were all skills measured by the LPT, a standard tool that measured expressive skills needed in the general classroom. But knowing this information and the importance of these skills in relation to proficient literacy development (Snow et al., 1998), Marcy’s education team members set new objectives to help her develop these skills in the coming year. Marcy did not understand either routine or complex English grammar. She could not point to the correct picture when asked to find “The boy is sleepy,” “Where does the boy play baseball?” or “The boy saw

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a girl who was carrying a hammer,” as required on the Clinical Evaluation of Linguistic Fundamentals (CELF)-Sentence Structure subtest (16th percentile). Neither could she follow simple commands in formal evaluation sessions where routine and context were absent. This was measured by the CELF-Concepts and Directions subtest (9th percentile). Marcy’s language was expressed in short, ungrammatical utterances, and an enormous amount of prior knowledge was required by adults to discern her meaning. Videotaped language samples confirm that although Marcy communicated with great joy and enthusiasm, the listener was most often completely stumped by what she was trying to say. Marcy’s reading-related abilities were not formally evaluated during her kindergarten year. Although she had not worked specifically on sound-to-letter matching or a sight-word vocabulary as might be common for kindergartners (Snow et. al., 1998), Marcy was an emergent reader, according to the information of stages/phases of reading synthesized by Gunning (1996) from the work of several researchers, including Chall (1983). In this stage, birth to 5 years old, children “draw conclusions based on perception and experience” (p. 13). Like other emergent readers, Marcy could read environmental print and scribble, and she loved for adults to read to her. Fountas and Pinnell (1996) described this stage as one in which emergent readers gained information about text from pictures and could attend to some features of print. In kindergarten, Marcy demonstrated her acquisition of some phonemic relationships through the speech and language work that was the focus of her school day. Just a few months later as she began first grade, Marcy demonstrated that “speech and language” activities affected her understanding of phonics and sight words. That is, she used several sound-toprint connections when given Clay’s (1993) written dictation task, an assessment that required her to print the phonemic sounds that represented words pronounced by an adult. Obviously, there were many language skills that Marcy’s educational team could have chosen to facilitate. They prioritized language and literacy targets by using developmental guidelines, such as the Developmental Language Curriculum (reprinted in LuetkeStahlman, 1998), Gunning’s (1996) synthesis of read-

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ing stages, and a district list of research-based literacy accomplishments similar to those of Snow et al. (1998). When adults helped Marcy acquire skills correlated with reading proficiency and mediated conversation around text, they used a method of developing vocabulary and grammar that was an alternative to isolated drill-and-practice tasks. We believe this practice was of paramount importance in allowing Marcy to progress with language and literacy development as she did throughout the elementary years.

First Grade: Average Narrative Reading Comprehension Achieved Throughout her first grade year, Marcy again was taught in the resource room by a teacher of the deaf. She and two other deaf children her age worked there on academic curriculum and were integrated with hearing children for lunch, recess, and “specials.” She did not receive formal social studies, science, or spelling instruction. Few hearing children are afforded the 3:1 teacher-pupil ratio for language arts that Marcy had, but instruction in a resource room and an individualized program are common when students are deaf or identified as language-impaired. Marcy entered first grade ready to learn to read. According to the reading stages compiled by Gunning (1996), she was a beginning reader (see Table 3). Her reading program from first to fifth grade consisted of three specific reading activities: adult-student shared reading, adult-student guided reading using leveled text, and independent student reading (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996). The activities within each of these components were guided by stage theory (Ehri, 1992; Fountas & Pinnell, 1996) and grounded in effective teaching methodology with a strategy focus (Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, Misretta-Hampston, & Echevarria, 1998). Assessment and focused intervention are integral to the effective teaching process, as a teacher must know what skills a student has acquired and which can be aided to emerge subsequently. Students are assisted to progress from dependence to independence with any behavior (Vygosky, 1978). One of the most important jobs of effective instructors is helping students to “develop independence and self-evaluation skills” (Tierney & Pearson, 1994, p. 515). Marcy was

fortunate that her teachers were cognizant of effective teaching strategies, including empowering strategy instruction. Shared reading was a high priority to the teacher of the deaf, who conducted almost daily sessions with Marcy and her two deaf peers. She was cognizant that researchers such as Wells (1985) found that when young children interacted with an adult around narrative and expository text, their language and literacy knowledge improved. Mason (1992) noted that during shared reading, adults can provide an umbrella of explanations, interpretations, and clarifications during “teachable moments,” because they know the background experiences of their students, as well as what the children know. With this information, teachers can make life-to-text and text-to-life connections (Cochran-Smith, 1984) with students, bridging from what they know to new concepts, vocabulary, and grammatical structures. These elements were characteristic of the shared-reading experiences Marcy enjoyed. Guided-reading sessions occurred individually four or five times a week. Team members decided that just like a hearing “at-risk” first grader, Marcy would benefit from the instruction of a specially trained reading-intervention teacher. Thus, a deaf educator, trained in the procedures of a reading-intervention program entitled Kansas Accelerated Literacy Learning (KALL) (Nielsen & Glasnapp, 1999), met for 30 minutes a day with Marcy, four to five days a week. KALL procedures are similar to Reading Recovery (Clay, 1993) and guided reading methodology in that lessons consist of three parts: re-reading an independent-level story, word work, and instructional-level reading with teacher support using a variety of wordrecognition strategies. Both narrative and expository books were read, and focused instruction and the development of independence were key elements of the program. Guided-reading instruction is an instructional framework recommended for beginning readers who are hearing, deaf, monolingual, or bilingual (Lally, 1998; Luetke-Stahlman, 1999). Although daily guidedreading activities vary greatly depending on the needs of the students (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996), each 30minute session involves teacher-student interactions


that include activities found empirically to correlate with reading achievement. The goal of these lessons is to develop beginning word recognition and comprehension strategies applied to gradually more difficult text. Scaffolded instruction and analytical conversations around text are believed to be the key to this approach’s success (Pinnell, 1994). As noted, word-recognition strategies were emphasized as a part of the KALL guided-reading procedure, as was depth of vocabulary knowledge (e.g., defining words, providing antonyms and synonyms, making associations, etc). The word-study aspect of the lesson emphasized using writing to promote sound/symbol learning and the development of the concept of word. Phonic skills also were practiced with the speechlanguage pathologist as explained below. In these ways, Marcy received phonics instruction “first and fast” (Juel & Minden-Cupp, 1999). She experienced the activities that Fountas and Pinnell (1996) described as essential to help beginning readers move to the next stage of reading where word recognition is more automatic. Marcy was greatly motivated and empowered by her progress as a reader in the KALL sessions. While early videotaped sessions capture a posture of learned helplessness, stemming from her expectation that she should be told any word she could not read, sessions videotaped only a few weeks later show Marcy trying to figure out unknown words before asking for assistance. Marcy was helped only as needed to recognize words using phoneme to grapheme correspondences, picture and text-based semantic clues, and remembering if she had seen the word previously in the current or another text. Ehri’s (1991, 1992) phases of sight-word learning provided a framework for planning the word-study aspect of Marcy’s KALL lessons. Thus, the initial emphasis was on segmenting and blending (fully analyzing words) and later on the orthographic aspects of words as aids to word recognition. Marcy was provided with multimodal representations of phoneme combinations such as the articulation of the sounds in a word, identifying the written word as compared to another through listening, and the speechreading of words. After 18 weeks of KALL guided-reading lessons, Marcy tested at a Reading Recovery level of 20 (Peterson, 1991), a level roughly equivalent to an end-of-

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first-grade-year reader. Thereafter, Marcy’s teacher of the deaf began to provide the guided-reading lessons rather than the KALL reading specialist. Marcy saw a speech-language pathologist almost daily, and her ability to hear and speak continued to improve in first grade. The sounds Marcy was correctly able to produce gave adults insight into how well her brain was learning to process the sounds she heard artificially through her cochlear implant. For example, field notes kept by the speech-language pathologist indicated that highly similar two- and three-syllable words or phrases, such as “butterfly” and “Sunday sky” sounded like homonyms to Marcy, as she could not identify one from the other. In the process of helping Marcy focus on sounds in speaking and listening, the speech-language pathologist provided readingrelated help. Marcy often worked with prepared letters and words, or watched as the speech-language pathologist demonstrated letter-sound matches. Phonemes practiced during speech work were always attempted in isolation at the beginning, end, and middle of words, and then in sentences during each session. The work Marcy did with the speech-language pathologist was almost akin to phonemic awareness and phonics instruction during this year, although Marcy did not usually write letters or letter combinations while engaged in speech, audition, and expressive language tasks. Phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the broad term that refers to a child’s ability to manipulate sounds orally at the word level (e.g., identifying or producing rhyming words), syllable level (e.g., “Clap for the number of syllables you hear in the word ba-by”), and the sound or phoneme level. The sound level also is commonly referred to as “phonemic awareness.” The child demonstrates an ability to isolate sounds (e.g., “What sound do the words baby, ball, and bounce start with?”) and to segment and blend phonemes. There is a multitude of evidence justifying blending and segmenting activities to aid initial reading acquisition for both hearing (Adams, 1990) and deaf children (Transler, Leybaert, & Gombert, 1999). Griffith (1991) explained the importance of phonemic awareness in facilitating a child’s ability to internalize orthographic patterns. In Marcy’s case, this connection was facilitated by almost daily activities such as

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the imitation of single phonemes modeled by the speech-language pathologist, exercises to kinesthetically identify where a particular sound was produced, and the frequent fingerspelling of words—manually representing them using a series of distinct handshapes, one made for each letter of a word. Sometimes Marcy worked with the speech-language pathologist in the therapy room, but often they moved to the resource room or general education classroom, so that speech, listening, and phonological awareness could be practiced using authentic materials such as books used in reading lessons, graphic organizers that hung in the rooms, and written rules displayed on the classroom walls. Ling (1976) explained that “while deaf children do not have complete access to auditory information, they seem to be able to use some cues derived from speechreading, residual hearing, and/or articulatory training to discover the relationship between the sound of speech and English orthography” [and to] “read individual words” (Waters & Doehring, 1990; p. 331). Yet the phonological awareness of deaf students may be delayed (Dodd, 1974) and is apt to be seriously underspecified because not all of the phonetic distinctions available from listening can always be perceived (Dodd, 1974; Hanson, 1991). Intelligible speech articulation (oral language) is not essential for the acquisition of phonological awareness (Conrad, 1979; Hanson, 1982; Lichtenstein, 1985); neither is the ability to hear or speechread (Bebko, 1998). Both deaf students who sign, as well as those who do not, have been found to utilize phonological awareness to distinguish possible letter combinations from implausible ones and to recognize words. Neither sign nor fingerspelling interferes with the development of phonological awareness (Harris & Beech, 1998; Lichtenstein, 1998; Miller, 1997). Those working with Marcy believed that the development of phonological knowledge should be a priority and integrated it into numerous language arts and speech-stimulation experiences. Activities involving rhyming, blending, segmenting, and discussing other words with similar letter combinations were written into Marcy’s IEP. Development of word recognition. The term “phonics” is used to describe various activities involving print and

phonemes. Adams and Beranek (1994) explained that the “value of phonics instruction has been demonstrated with sobering consistency across literally hundreds of studies” (p. 3). The importance of developing an understanding of phonics has been evidenced in studies with typically developing children who are normally developing, as well as with those who are hearing- and language-challenged (Catts, 1991a, 1991b) and deaf (Paul, 1998). To facilitate Marcy’s understanding of sound-toprint connections and other strategies for word recognition, specific techniques were used during KALL guided-reading lessons. These are documented in daily field notes and enabled us to compile a chronology of Marcy’s developing word-recognition strategies in first grade. (See Appendix 2.) The chronology provided us with insight into the many strategies Marcy used to unlock unknown words as she read leveled text. Marcy initially decoded unknown words with reliance on their first letter. If there was a picture cue available, then she used the initial consonant and the picture to figure out the word and would typically say and sign it. If the unknown word was not associated with a picture cue, Marcy’s strategy was to provide a word that started with the same letter or letters as the one printed in the text. Thus, she confused words such as “the,” “there,” and“then.” Typical of readers at this early stage of developing word-recognition skills, Marcy did not attempt to segment unknown words beyond the first letter or rely on her limited knowledge of syntax to provide much assistance (Ehri, 1992). Explicit instruction taught her to look at all the aspects of a word as she decoded it. Vowels had to be extended in pronunciation so that she could discern them. She had more difficulty blending sounds than segmenting them, but adult facilitation in utilizing word-recognition strategies assisted Marcy in moving through Ehri’s (1992) partial alphabetic and full alphabetic phase of word learning. Marcy also was aware of rhyming words and was beginning to understand how this information could help her to decode unknown words. Yet she sometimes matched words by sight as much as sound. For example, one day during this time period she remarked, “Look, Mom, that’s ‘toot’: It rhymes with ‘foot.’” However, as the first-grade year progressed, Marcy was


helped to see the usefulness of noticing orthographic information such as the sequences of letters in unknown words as “chunks” and to blend them. Thus, she unlocked words by visually isolating chunks such as phonograms and endings to “read by analogy” (Gaskins, Ehri, Cress, O’Hara, & Donnelly, 1996/7). A lesson during this time might include the following teacher prompts, “Marcy, look, you can read ‘hill.’ Cover up the ‘h’ and make the /p/ sound. What word is that? Good. Now can you read the sentence again?” or “You know ‘grill.’ Can you sign ‘grill’ ⫹‘ing’? How do you say that word?” or “This part says ‘hill.’ Let’s practice saying ‘hill’ ⫹ ‘air’ ⫹ ‘e’ ⫹ ‘us’ (hilarious)—Good. Now, what do you think that means?” or “Let’s make a list: ‘fill,’ ‘unfulfilled,’ ‘fulfillment.’” Field notes and videotaped language samples document that eventually Marcy chunked word parts independently, a behavior characteristic of the consolidated alphabetic phrase of word learning (Ehri, 1992). Marcy was assisted to sign or fingerspell words, to compare word parts to other known words, and to find small words within larger words. Thus, Marcy progressed through the partial alphabetic and full alphabetic stages and moved into the consolidated stage (Ehri, 1992), where she demonstrated an ability to use the orthography of words to assist her decoding efforts. While orthography made decoding more efficient, sometimes Marcy would call upon her early approach to decoding: isolating sounds, segmenting, and blending. A difference between Marcy’s development of word-recognition strategies and that of a hearing child was that Marcy was reading many words that she had never heard. Most hearing children have a “listening vocabulary” of words they have heard repeatedly before learning to read. When Marcy came to a word with an unfamiliar meaning, the teacher of the deaf explained it to her. Together they practiced decoding, pronouncing, speechreading, and listening to the new word. Language strategies such as defining, giving examples, and relating the word to an experience in Marcy’s life also were used to explain the meaning of words. Thus, the language-reading connection did not involve just the phonological aspects of a word but an understanding of its meaning (semantics) and of its place in a sentence (syntax) as well.

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Other first-grade experiences. Marcy was helped to spell the words within a short sentence related to the text as a part of each KALL intervention lesson. She began spelling with a focus on individual sounds, but soon knowledge of how to spell one word in a word family enabled her to spell more words using that phonogram. With this knowledge and her reading experiences, Marcy’s ability to spell words increased dramatically, and she “began to build an understanding of the orthography of words” (Copeland et al., 1994, p. 28). Reinforced by her teacher’s recording of the words she could spell, Marcy demonstrated that she was “sensitive to the orthography of words” (Copeland et al., 1994, p. 28). Marcy could read some books independently and near the end of first grade, she especially enjoyed reading stories that previously had been read to her from series such as those with the Clifford and Curious George characters. She read enough independently to acquire some words as a consequence of seeing them repeatedly (Stanovich, 1986). Her parents were thrilled that she was developing a degree of independence as a reader. It was no secret that they valued reading and fostered Marcy’s self-esteem and independence around text. The family was “high” on what Mason (1992) labeled “intellectual literacy stimulation” (p. 216) and made frequent trips to the bookstore to find books on Marcy’s reading level. Marcy was aware of the purpose of print, but she did not have the language knowledge of her hearing peers to participate with them in the languageexperience stories, response journal writing, and other beginning writing activities that occurred in the firstgrade general education classroom. Marcy wrote mediated single sentences as a part of her KALL guidedreading lessons and sometimes as a part of lessons during other work throughout the day, but written expression was not an emphasis of first-grade instruction. However, Marcy’s writing activities played a valuable role in enhancing her sensitivity to sound-symbol correspondences and assisted her development of phonemic awareness. She evidenced emergent writing skills. She often added a request to the family food list on the refrigerator. When asked, she could “read” the “word” so that it could be purchased by a parent at the grocery store, because her “print” was completely in-

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discernible to anyone but herself. She labeled her possessions with the letter “M,” even though that also was the initial of one of her sisters. First-grade assessment results. Marcy’s basic conversational abilities improved in first grade. When her speech was assessed during the first-grade year, she produced approximately half of the phonemes evaluated in initial, medial, and final position using the Goldman-Fristoe Articulation Test. Her ability to say single words also was assessed with the Test of Language Development (TOLD), designed by Ling (1976) and described in Luetke-Stahlman (1999), on which she scored 96%. Marcy could articulate most phonemes at the word level, but her conversational speech during discourse remained comprehensible 50% of the time to an unfamiliar listener, as rated by the speechlanguage pathologist during classroom observations. Receptive and expressive language scores revealed minimal growth on standardized assessments (measuring cognitive-academic language proficiency) since the previous year. For example, Marcy’s scores on the Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) on subtests of the ASSEST were below to low average and equated to a hearing child 2 years younger than she was. The appropriateness of her not being educated in the general education classroom with an educational interpreter simply translating the instruction of the teacher for Marcy’s preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade years was confirmed by these standardized test scores. Now 7 years old, Marcy had the language abilities of a 5-year-old but had not yet acquired the cognitive-academic abilities required in the typical classrooms. A language sample, both spoken and signed, taken in the middle of her first-grade year, illustrated Marcy’s struggle with English grammar (and her own awareness of her deficiencies): Marcy: Santa Claus brought me a new bike, that’s new, really new. I use it every time—not snow—Dad put in basement. Teacher: So are you riding it now in the basement? Marcy: No, mean Dad said, “You can ride in garage.” Teacher: Oh, you can’t ride it on the street? Marcy: No, too snow. Almost flat snow. Ask me another question.

At the beginning of first grade, Marcy exhibited approximately one-third of the developmentally listed, research-based literacy accomplishments for first grade provided by Snow and her colleagues (1998). She understood the parts of books and their functions, tracked print, pretended to read, and knew the letters of the alphabet. She identified upper and lower case letters, evidenced an understanding of the basic concepts of print, and wrote several words independently on the written vocabulary subtest of Clay’s (1993) assessment tools. Five sources of reading data were available at the end of first grade with which to evaluate Marcy’s literacy attainment. The first was a set of tasks used for assessment in the KALL intervention program. On a phonological awareness measure, Marcy segmented and blended 33% of the items given (Taylor, 1989) as compared to 0% at the beginning of the year. She also demonstrated the ability to segment and make soundto-print connections on Clay’s (1993) dictation task by correctly writing 36 of the 37 phonemes spoken by an adult. Although Marcy was acquiring word-recognition skills using multiple strategies (Appendix 2), such emphases are not common or accepted practice in many deaf-education programs, because the development of phonological awareness and phonic practice is thought to be unproductive for deaf students (see Strong & Prinz, 1997). We hope that projects such as this case study will encourage teachers and speech-language pathologists to direct students’ attention to segmenting and blending sounds, making sound-print connections, and using multiple word-recognition strategies (e.g., chunking, attention to meaning via pictures, etc.). In doing so, teachers must value the acquisition of phonological awareness, allot time and effort to its facilitation, and assess and monitor acquisition. The child must be expected to use sound-based strategies in attempting to decode unknown words. As a second indication of reading progress, Marcy exhibited more of the language and literacy accomplishments for first grade suggested by Snow et al. (1998). Some examples include comprehending nonfiction that was appropriately designed for first grade; showing evidence of expanding her language repertory, including increasing appropriate use of formal language registers; predicting and justifying what will happen next in stories; and discussing how, why, and


what-if questions in sharing nonfiction text. As evidenced by running records, Marcy made fewer nonsensical errors, self-corrected, and monitored her comprehension of words. These were age-appropriate accomplishments (Snow et al., 1998). A third evaluation source was Marcy’s progress through 20 levels of first-grade text (Peterson, 1991) in the KALL guided-reading program—and thereafter, with first-grade stories chosen by her teacher of the deaf. She demonstrated that she comprehended the text she was reading and also that she comprehended second-grade passages when given an informal reading measure, the Qualitative Reading Inventory (Leslie & Caldwell, 1990) at the end of the year. A fourth reading-evaluation source was the district-designed curriculum-based reading assessment (CBA). (See Table 9.) On this, Marcy was required to read authentic passages and answer comprehension questions in writing. Her answers were blindly scored by teachers trained in the use of a district scoring rubric. On the first-grade narrative task both at midyear and end-of-the-year, Marcy was judged to be a “strong performer,” as were 78% and 70%, respectively, of the other first graders in her school. However, on the expository task, she fell into the category of “further development needed” both at the middle and end of the year. In contrast, most of her hearing peers were judged to be “strong performers.” Experiences with expository text exposes children to unique language structures (Pappas, 1993) that Marcy simply could not comprehend. Team members made note of this in the objectives they set for the coming year. The final evaluation source during first grade was the Gates-MacGinitie (MacGinitie & MacGinitie, 1989) test administered for the first time at the end of the year. Marcy’s scored at the 33rd percentile on the Vocabulary subtest, and at the 34th percentile on the Comprehension subtest. The total score of 30th percentile was within the low-average range but just below the 33rd percentile, a cutoff used in some states to determine who is to qualify for special reading services (McCormick, 1992). In fact, with a total score of below the 40th percentile, Marcy would have received Title I services in the school district in which she was enrolled, had she not already been served by specialeducation personnel. In summary, Marcy made considerable language

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and literacy progress in her first-grade year. She did not score as a typical first grader on the expository CBA measures and the standardized reading subtests, but she demonstrated the development of wordrecognition strategies and of comprehension of narrative text. She evidenced low-average reading vocabulary ability and high-average ability to comprehend narrative text. It may be surprising that Marcy was able to read proficiently with such delayed receptive and expressive language abilities. However, this finding is supported by the research. Both Huba and RamisettyMikler (1995) and Crain-Thoreson and Dale (1992) found little correlation between reading achievement and the receptive and expressive language development of beginning readers.

Second Grade: Inching Forward In second grade, Marcy was again educated in the resource room for language arts activities, a period that included reading, writing, and spelling activities with a teacher of the deaf and one deaf peer. She went with a teacher of the deaf to the general classroom for math soon after the year began, and by midyear, she also participated in the social studies and science activities there. A teacher of the deaf mediated the instruction of the general education teacher to a linguistic level that Marcy could comprehend. This teacher also helped Marcy practice cognitive-academic language abilities. For example, mediation allowed Marcy more opportunities to express herself than would have otherwise been afforded, as she was asked to provide examples and characteristics or to repeat information supplied by the classroom teachers or peers. Following the focus of her IEP, the teacher of the deaf also assisted her to define terms including a superordinate term and critical details, producing antonyms, synonyms, and analogies for novel vocabulary words. Because Marcy had difficulty expressing English syntax, she always was asked to define a word using the same format: A is a (superordinate) that (distinguishing characteristics). This syntactic “frame” was required for several years. Marcy participated regularly in both sharedreading and guided-reading activities, as she had the year before (see Table 4). Shared reading was based on the Macmillan basal that the district had adopted for second graders. Both shared and guided reading were

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facilitated by a teacher of the deaf. Guided-reading procedures were adapted for second-grade readers by Luetke-Stahlman and Nielsen (1995) by extending the explicit discussion of concepts of print (e.g., a sentence can continue to the next page, the meaning of an italicized or bolded word, and how to use the table of contents, index, and glossary). Adaptation also included the addition of semantic activities, including defining words, and determining antonyms, synonyms, and associating 10 vocabulary words from readings per week. During the second-grade year, Marcy read books or excepts from books (as packaged in the basal), including Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (Cleary, 1981), Lon Po Po (Young, 1989), Two Bad Ants (Van Allsburg, 1988), The Patchwork Quilt (Flournoy, 1985), and How My Parents Learned to Eat (Friedman, 1987). Word lists collected in her second-grade year showed evidence of the numerous strategies used to call attention to words in the basal stories Marcy was reading. These included: • vocabulary words written with a space between each syllable (e.g., Ro ber ta, Ra mo na, ex haust ed); • synonyms enclosed in a circle as an indication that they meant the same thing (e.g., very cold, freezing); • lists of words that began in similar ways (e.g., retell, return, remember, relive, repaint, relieve, redo, rewind, remove, rewrite); • related words (e.g., enjoy, overjoyed; absent, absentminded); • spelling comparisons (e.g., thought, through; still, sill); • semantic continuum work (e.g., the words march, walk, skip written in a row; the words morning, noon, afternoon, dusk, twilight, dark written in a row): • use of word webs (e.g., a web of “trees” with words such as maple, fir, peach, willow, and birch); • attention to inflective affixes (e.g., berry, berries) and derivational suffixes (e.g., misery, miserable); rhymes (e.g., wedge, ledge); • drawings to support word meaning (e.g., of a wedge or whiskers); • a list of partitives (e.g., deck of cards, suit of armor, yards of material); • the drawing of a family tree to explain this figure of speech (e.g., Mr. and Ms. Quimby and their children, Howie, Willa Jean, etc.);

• lists of figures of speech with explanations (e.g., mixed feelings); • use of timelines (e.g., spring: Tanya was sick and Grandma started the quilt, fall: Jim’s pants went into the quilt, December: Grandma got sick, etc.); • comparisons of contractions (e.g., ain’t, isn’t); and • semantic and syntactic work that included first expressing and then writing new vocabulary in sentences related to the text. Following district guidelines, spelling work consisted of the discussion throughout the week of how to spell a list of 10–15 arbitrary high-frequency words and a Friday test. Marcy also began to participate in process-writing activities in second grade. The focus was on constructing a paragraph with an appropriate opening sentence, several details, and a closing sentence that was different from the first sentence. The classroom teacher and the teacher of the deaf planned these assignments. A graphic organizer almost always was used, the most common one being a hamburger of which the top part of the bun represented the opening sentence and so forth. Student-teacher conferencing was frequent, and mini-lessons were highly tailored to meet Marcy’s writing needs. In second grade, there was no peer review or peer editing, and it concerned her educational team members that Marcy rarely read her written work to an audience. It was difficult to find a sample of Marcy’s writing from second grade that had not been edited during writing-process activities. An unedited example was found in a dialogue journal and is retyped exactly as Marcy wrote it: I and my friend play outside. Friends play ni them room. I and my friend eats laache (lunch). In addition, Marcy wrote at least monthly to her grandmother, who wrote back. She also enjoyed writing journal entries at school and could hardly wait each day to see what the teacher would include in her written response. Marcy informed her parents of these exchanges with enthusiasm. She also began journaling on her own at home and continues that practice today. Assessment data from second grade demonstrated that Marcy made steady observable progress in her ability to comprehend the speech sounds she heard. Approximately three and a half years after she first heard speech, she was able to make finer distinctions


between words auditorially (without signs), but she could not differentiate consonants that differed in “place” of articulation and were at the end of words. For example, “fab” and “fall” sounded the same to her. Because Marcy did not hear speech sounds as hearing children did, her spelling of “within word” patterns challenged her (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 1996). In tandem with her listening abilities, Marcy now could articulate most of the basic phonemes, regardless of their position in words (scoring 51% on the Goldman-Fristoe), but had trouble articulating the first consonant of the second syllable in two-syllable words. For example, she could pronounce “book” correctly, but said “booklet” as “book-it.” The emphasis in first grade on phonological decoding skills with attention to orthographic aspects of words prepared Marcy for second-grade wordrecognition tasks. After 4 years of exposure to grammatically correct signed English via the SEE system, Marcy’s English grammar skills were slowly improving. Because the SEE system emphasizes English morphological structure, Marcy’s attention was focused on inflectional and derivational differences in words in a manner analogous to spoken words being pronounced in distinct syllables (Carliste, 1995). As compared with her receptive-language ability the previous year, Marcy demonstrated improved cognitive-academic abilities on tests designed to mirror the semantic and syntactic requirements of the general education classroom. Marcy’s comprehension of sentence-level grammar improved from first to second grade, especially on the CELF-Sentence Structure subtest (9th percentile to 50th percentile). Test items included such structures, as “Point to the boy who is sleepy,” “Where does the boy play baseball?” and “The boy saw a girl who was carrying a hammer.” On the TOLD-Grammatical Understanding subtest, which asked her to judge whether sentences were correct, Marcy scored in the low-average range (25th percentile). On expressive semantic language measures, Marcy improved on the cognitive-academic language skills targeted for facilitation on her IEP. She scored in the low-average range on three LPT expressive semantic subtests, the total LPT test, and on the TOLD-Word

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Associations subtest, a measure similar to the LPTAssociations subtest. These tools asked Marcy to express and explain more than one element or label of a concept (as on the receptive test, the PPVT), an ability we refer to here as “depth of word knowledge.” The tests enabled her to demonstrate conceptual schema or networks of vocabulary understanding found to be critical for reading (e.g., Dickinson, Cote, & Smith, 1993; Paul, 1996; Ruddell & Unrau, 1994). On the only expressive grammar test given in second grade, the TOLD-Sentence Imitation subtest, Marcy scored below average. However, she did improve in her basic grammatical abilities, as evidenced in a study conducted by Luetke-Stahlman, Griffiths, and Montgomery (1998, 1999). Using a multiple baseline, single-subject design, mediation was shown to facilitate specific English vocabulary, grammar, and textstructure behaviors that were targeted for mediated instruction by adults during reading activities. Weekly videotaped retellings of stories and expository pieces showed no change in behaviors that were not targeted for mediation. Marcy also was seen to produce longer retellings over the 9-month period. She increased the number and variety of pronouns, conjunctions, and modals she used; she increased her correct use of the “do” verb and “be” verbs, and she increasingly used “said” correctly. Marcy moved toward the stage of “Growing Independence” in second grade (Gunning, 1996), a stage marked by a reader’s knowledge and application of a variety of basic word-recognition strategies and by attention to developing fluency, automaticity, and comprehension. While Marcy demonstrated about 50% of the accomplishments listed by Snow et al. (1998) for second-grade children, she still did not comprehend second-grade nonfiction text. She also had trouble decoding multisyllable and nonsense words that were more than two syllables in length, reading irregularly spelled words, using increasing formal language registers, discussing similarities and events across stories, and connecting and comparing information in nonfiction selections. On the district’s narrative reading CBA, Marcy was judged to be a “strong performer” both at midyear and end-of-the-year, as were 51% and 70%, respectively, of the other second graders in her school. On the exposi-

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tory CBA, she was deemed a “strong performer” midyear, as were 33% of her peers, but by the end of the year, Marcy fell into the “further development needed” category, although 61% of her peers were judged to be “strong performers” in this category. While Marcy might have developed enough understanding of semantic and syntactic knowledge of English to make progress in reading narrative text, our field notes showed that she had observable difficulties with the complexity of English required to understand instruction in the general education classroom or to silently read textbooks. Her academic language needs were illustrated in a sample taken near the end of the year during a text retelling that included spoken and signed utterances. Analysis of the sample revealed that while Marcy was more able to convey story-structure elements and showed that she understood what she had read, she had severe grammatical difficulties that were atypical of hearing children: “I want to tell you a good story about sport. I will introduce the people who . . . people. . . . I want to introduce Marco [fingerspelled] and Sam [fingerspelled] is same boy. They same size. But they look like brother.” Marcy’s Gates-MacGinitie scores improved 10 percentile points from first to second grade and were within the low average range. Apparently, the intensive work to increase the depth of Marcy’s word knowledge had improved her comprehension ability (Dickinson et al., 1993). With such scores, Marcy no longer would have qualified for special reading services given the criterion of district standards mentioned earlier. Marcy discovered chapter books and those in a series, characteristic of as readers at the “Growing Independence” stage (Gunning, 1996). Following family rules, Marcy read independently each night for about 45 minutes. Even today, she cannot part with the Boxcar Children books she collected in second grade. “Ooh,” she’ll say, “Those were such good stories!” Although some of Marcy’s language and reading abilities were similar to those documented for most second-grade deaf children (see review by Paul, 1998; Paul & Quigley, 1994), she did not evidence some of the skills Gunning (1996) described for a reader at the “Growing Independence” stage. For example, developing fluency is the hallmark of this phase, and because Marcy did not “know” the meaning of many of the words she read, fluency was interrupted, making it

difficult for her to read silently. Because she did not have a “listening vocabulary” typical of other second graders, the subtleties of language, such as the comedy of humorous books containing “knock, knock” jokes, escaped her. The challenge for members of her educational team was to continue to develop Marcy’s automaticity in decoding words while expanding her understanding of word meanings, so her cognitive energy could focus more on comprehending longer units of text. As with her first-grade writing samples, most of Marcy’s second-grade writing samples had been so heavily edited by a teacher that they did not give evidence of Marcy’s writing ability. However, unedited samples of written retells from a project (LuetkeStahlman et al., 1998; 1999) were analyzed using the Kansas state-approved six-trait writing assessment rubrics. They revealed that the mean score on the rubric for voice was 2.09 out of a possible 5 points; the rubric scores for organization, word choice, and sentence fluency were each 2.75; for conventions, it was 2.88; and for ideas, it was 3.09. In summary, the majority of results from receptive and expressive language measures, and from well as reading subtests, illustrated that Marcy had developed average, albeit low average, cognitive-academic linguistic abilities in her second-grade year. In particular, she had acquired derivational and inflectional morphology through speech and sign to assist her as she began independently using word-recognition strategies. Her acquisition of this morphology, coupled with an everincreasing depth of word knowledge, allowed her to decode unknown words and discern the meaning of what she read more accurately. This behavior is supported by numerous researchers who found that morphological knowledge of English is evident by second grade and that its acquisition is significantly correlated with reading achievement, independent of phonological awareness or intelligence (Bowey & Patel, 1988; Brittain, 1970; Carliste, 1995; Harris, 1975; Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 1996; Rubin, 1988).

Third Grade: Linguistic and Reading Achievement Is Maintained Except for beginning weekly cello lessons to develop her listening skills, Marcy’s speech and auditory activi-


ties were much the same as previously reported. Although these skills were no longer formally assessed, goals and objectives were written, facilitated with school subject content, and monitored annually for Marcy’s IEP (see Table 5). Marcy participated in the general education classroom with a teacher of the deaf for social studies, science, and math classes during her third-grade year. As in the past, the teacher of the deaf accompanied Marcy to mediate the instruction of the general education teacher to a linguistic level that Marcy could comprehend, asked Marcy intermittent questions, and allowed her numerous opportunities to express herself. Marcy was assisted, as she had been the previous year, to develop cognitive-academic language. Reading and writing activities were programmed much as they had been previously, with new objectives written as old ones were met. Examples of concepts of print that were explained during the year were the functions of a hyphen and how italics are sometimes used to indicate stage directions. Tests were sometimes adapted to meet Marcy’s limited language skills; when other third graders were asked to write a paragraph explaining, for example, three ways to use a pulley, Marcy received full credit for merely listing her answers. With regard to spelling instruction, the teacher of the deaf utilized district materials developed for hearing third graders and taught Marcy in the resource room. Although the curriculum centered on the spelling of arbitrary words on a Friday test, during this year the district also developed a personalized spelling booklet for each student. In addition to tips on spelling strategies and basic rules, it included a page for each letter of the alphabet, a list of some words on each of these pages, and many blanks so that students could add words that they wanted to be able to spell. The booklets allowed students to be more independent spellers when they were engaged in process writing activities. Marcy’s teachers were faithful users of the spelling booklets in third through sixth grades. Assessment-based intervention decisions, a low teacher-to-student ratio, and a supportive home environment remained integral components of Marcy’s language and literacy instruction. Starting with second semester of third grade, vocabulary became the focus of both home and school activities. Marcy’s family attempted to play a variety of

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vocabulary games with her, both as board games and on the computer. The teacher of the deaf selected 5 to 10 expository words a week to analyze with Marcy as she had done previously. They would work several times a week to pronounce and blend the phonemes of these words, as well as to discuss their semantic attributions, such as synonyms, antonyms, associations, and distinguishing characteristics. Examples and nonexamples of concepts were routinely contrasted (e.g., a stream is a small or narrow, flowing body of water. A river is a nonexample, because although it contains water and is flowing, it is not narrow or small). Nippold (1985) found that such skills correlated with academic success, which reinforced the importance of this focus for Marcy. The information about each word was kept in a notebook for reference, along with figurative expressions and multiple meanings of words discussed. A variety of graphic organizers was used in conjunction with vocabulary activities, especially a semantic continuum. For example, if the expression “sheets of rain,” was discussed, it was put in context along a continuum of words associated with rain, such as drizzle, rain, downpour, torrents, raining cats and dogs, and so forth. These activities may have increased Marcy’s basic, routine vocabulary skills, but they did not seem to influence her score on a test of receptive and expressive language skills required for success in the general classroom. During third grade, Marcy showed many indications of reading enjoyment and interest in new vocabulary words, despite the limited progress in her language growth demonstrated on formal tests. For example, she often asked the meaning of words and figurative phrases she came upon in her reading and would risk using new words in conversations. Some examples that were discussed while reading Charlotte’s Web (White, 1952) were school of fish and feeling poorly. When queried about where she had learned a new word, Marcy would often reference a previous story or discussion. She began to scan articles in the newspaper as she ate breakfast and would often comment on current events she read about in the newspaper or on the captioned television news. Her grandmother started to send her a children’s science magazine, which she read the day it arrived every month. Marcy’s parents continued to keep books of an appropriate difficulty available in several

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comfortable locations around their home. For example, a low shelf was kept stocked near the couch where Marcy waited for the school bus each morning and another near the kitchen table. Writing continued to be a problem for Marcy. An unedited entry from a journal she kept at home documents her delayed development of written language skills: Dear Dariy, Hi draiy today my sister mary pat got wasp shunned her hand and she said, “That she saw two wasps on her and she yelled so loud at her friend’s house.” I told her I was sorry for her. Mary Pat is now at our house for dinner and change her clothes because she been swimming and she needed mecdice for her hand. [No new date] Today I came back from Scattergood. It is kinda of boring over there and my sister and I was figting a little. One thing was a lot of fun is getting wet and have water ballon play. My sister Hannah is going to Scatter good school for this year in Iwoa for one year. Although few formal language measures were administered in third grade, Marcy demonstrated continued improvement in her receptive ability to comprehend academic language, scoring within the low and mid-ranges. Her ability to identify age-appropriate pictures of vocabulary words on the PPVT moved into the low-average range for the first time. Expressively, Marcy also scored low-average on two word-level grammar tasks. On a subtest of word associations (the CELF Word Class), she scored in the 37th percentile in identifying words that belonged together. (An example of a test item is “Button, shirt, chair—which two go together?”) These types of items seemed to reflect the depth of word knowledge being facilitated in reading activities. On the CELF-Word Structure subtest (on which she also scored within the 37th percentile), Marcy had to complete a sentence with the correct grammatical form. Examples were (a) “The girl has a notebook. The notebook belongs to .” (b) “The children are playing a game. This is the game the children ”; and (c) “Neither Mom nor Dad helped the twins. They got dress .” That

Marcy did well on this subtest was important. Investigators have found that morphological awareness is routinely called upon as a decoding strategy by third grade (Apel & Swank, 1999) and that poor morphological awareness contributes to poor decoding skills. Marcy seemed to be applying the morphology she had learned from the SEE system, in which derivational and inflectional affixes were marked by signs added to root words. On two expressive sentence-level tasks, Marcy demonstrated below-average ability. Leong (1984) studied third graders and found that a syntactic/ semantic task accounted for more reading variance (30%) than phonological awareness (8%) in the mid-elementary grades. Carliste (1995) mentioned three other studies reporting a correlation between syntax and reading, but in general, there is little research regarding syntax and reading in the upper elementary grades. Marcy continued to develop as a reader in her third-grade year. Along with all district third graders, Marcy took the Iowa Basic Skills reading subtests and scored in the low-average range for both reading vocabulary and passage comprehension. Her reading achievement was similar on the Gates-MacGinitie reading test. Thus, Marcy seemed to maintain the linguistic and reading achievement she had evidenced the previous year.

Fourth Grade: The Reading Vocabulary and Comprehension Gap In fourth grade, Marcy was again integrated with her peers in the general classroom with a teacher of the deaf for social studies, science, and math classes. She joined the school orchestra and continued to see the speech-language pathologist daily to work on articulation. As part of the district spelling curriculum, the spelling booklets, described previously, were used again. Marcy’s goals and objectives for listening and speech articulation involved her pronouncing multisyllablic words and becoming better understood during extended conversations about narrative and expository topics. Thus, Marcy’s conversational abilities were targeted to move from the basic to the academic level (see Table 6).


Marcy continued to have weekly shared- andguided-reading sessions with her teacher of the deaf focusing on strategies for dealing with a variety of texts. These lessons were reduced to three times a week because of scheduling conflicts. Yet Marcy’s team found time for these activities because they were aware of their importance with beginning readers (Clay, 1991). The strategy instruction emphasized in Marcy’s literary activities also was found to be helpful to older readers. Pressley and Woloshyn (1995), among others, emphasized teaching students to read strategically is a crucial step in producing proficient readers. Often, however, teachers minimize students’ need for strategic reading (Caverly, Mandeville, & Nicholson, 1995). Marcy continued to learn more sophisticated concepts of print and word-recognition skills, with an emphasis on the orthography and morphology of words, in fourth grade. An example of a concept of print at this level was knowing that a reference to a figure, such as “2.1” meant that the figure was the first figure in the second chapter. The importance of the various sizes of headings, also found in textbooks, is another example. Important vocabulary words from school subjects were defined and discussed by Marcy and the teacher of the deaf, as they were in third grade. The sheets on which this work was done were sent home on Fridays for use in conversations and included such topics as a discussion on rhyming words, words spelled in similar ways, and the use of the words in sentences unrelated to school subjects. Marcy’s education team members persisted in enriching the depth of her knowledge of vocabulary words, aware of their importance to reading comprehension (Tabors, 1996). Key vocabulary words were manipulated in a second way during fourth grade to reinforce orthographic patterns. Marcy’s teacher of the deaf began a wordstudy notebook that evolved in form but was used several times a week in the fourth- through sixth-grade years. It was organized by the sounds of letters. For example, if the word “brain” from her science book was discussed, Marcy was asked to write it in her word study notebook. To do so, Marcy would look for the page that had the long /a/ sound. This was labeled as A1 in the notebook (because the letter “a” has several sounds associated with it) and a list of 10 spellings of the long /a/ sound appeared down the left side of the

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page (i.e., a, ai, aigh, au, ay, e, ei, eig, eigh, and ey). Three spaces were provided after each spelling, so that words could be entered according to how many syllables were in them. To add the word “brain” to the booklet, Marcy looked down the left-hand column of the page, past the various spellings of the long /a/ sound, found the “ai” spelling, and wrote the “brain” in the first space after it. The word “grainy” could be written in the second blank, being a two-syllable word. For about the last month of fourth grade, Marcy participated in the general classroom reading activities with her hearing peers for the first time. These centered on a book about the Titanic disaster. Marcy, who had seen the movie popular in the theaters at the time, was estactic to read and discuss the story with her peers and saw her inclusion in the general classroom as evidence that she was a “good reader.” During the 4-week unit, Marcy used an interpreter to comprehend the remarks of the general education teacher and peers. The teacher of the deaf was often in the classroom also, ready to provide as much mediation as was necessary, but just as important, not assisting if she was not needed. Marcy successfully completed unit projects, quizzes, and tests, as evaluated by the general education classroom teacher. The school district adopted a new spelling curriculum in Marcy’s fourth-grade year, and the speechlanguage pathologist based her work on speech articulation, speechreading, and listening around these lessons. This resulted in the creative scheduling of time for speech articulation, listening work, and spelling. The approach included an equal number of words taken from Marcy’s process writing, words that did not follow sound-to-letter patterns, and words that were patterned (or rule-based). Word sorts and discovery of patterns were not emphasized at school (Bear et al., 1996) but were practiced about once a week at home. Also at home, Marcy engaged in “Making Words” activities (Cunningham & Hall, 1995), in which small words are made from letters. She completed approximately a lesson daily for 4 months in the spring. In Marcy’s fourth-grade year, very little receptive or expressive language data were collected. She remained challenged to comprehend age-appropriate vocabulary and sentence-level grammar, scoring within the below average range (13th percentile) on the Oral

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and Written Language Scale (OWLS) receptive and expressive semantic and syntactic test. On the Rhode Island Test of Language Structure, a measure of receptive grammar, Marcy did not understand structures that a hearing 7-year-old would comprehend. For example, she did not comprehend passive reversals and complex sentences used in questions that included picture support. Consequently, she could not comprehend information that contained complex grammatical constructions she read from her social studies and science texts or from the Internet. Marcy was given the LPT midyear of fourth grade, a standardized test of semantic knowledge that had not been administered since second grade. She scored in the average range on most of the subtests, measures that reflected the cognitive-academic skills targeted in her reading program. This was important, because Tabors (1996) found that receptive vocabulary, wordrecognition skills, and expressive-meaning skills, such as the ability to formulate definitions, were significantly linked to reading comprehension by the end of fourth grade. Expressively, Marcy scored below average on two of the LPT semantic measures, but five other LPT subtests were in the low-average range. Her total LPT score (44th percentile) fell in the low-average range and seemed to indicate that she was not losing ground in her ability to express cognitive-academic concepts. Marcy continued to have difficulty expressing English grammar. She scored below average on the CELF-Formulated Sentences subtest, a concern to her team, because Flood and Menyuk (1983) found that the ability of fourth graders to identify ungrammatical sentences in spoken language was related significantly to reading achievement as measured by both the Standford Achievement Test (SAT) and the GatesMacGinitie reading tests. Marcy’s team identified comprehension and expression of grammatical constructions, beyond the simple sentence level, as an area of concentration and once again planned to specifically facilitate word and sentence syntax using school subject content. By the end of fourth grade, Marcy had been exposed to English signed in a grammatically accurate manner for 7 years. In addition, her team continued to improve her development of cognitive-academic lan-

guage (Cummins, 1984). Some researchers found that language-challenged children had to attain a threshold level of competence in English grammar before they could progress in reading their dominant language (Matluck & Tunmer, 1979). Cummins (1984) agreed, after extensively reviewing the second-language acquisition research, estimating that while it takes a student only about 2 years to acquire conversational skills, it takes approximately 5 to 7 years to develop academiclanguage proficiency. If this was correct, Marcy was just on the verge of obtaining the cognitive-academic (decontextualized) language skills required in the “Reading to Learn” stage of reading development (Gunning, 1996). Marcy demonstrated about 25% of the third-grade accomplishments listed by Snow and her colleagues (1998) by the end of fourth grade. For example, she could use letter-sound correspondences and structural analysis to decode words, read chapter books independently, and take part in creative responses to text. However, she had trouble identifying content specific words affecting comprehension, summarizing major points, and answering “what if ” questions about nonfiction text. She could not use information to examine bases of hypothetical and opinion pieces, infer word meanings, or incorporate literary words and grammar into her own writing. Examples of objectives written in Marcy’s IEP to increase her reading comprehension included making a word web of synonyms and antonyms of targeted reading vocabulary, fingerspelling unknown words in a chapter or story, and saying words with prefixes in syllables. On the Gates-MacGinitie reading test, Marcy scored within the low-average range on the vocabulary test (21st percentile) and similarly on the Woodcock Reading Mastery vocabulary assessment (16th percentile Word Comprehension). This ability was typical of deaf students (see review by Paul, 1998). For example, Paul reported (1998) that fourth- through sixth-grade deaf subjects scored in the mid-second-grade range compared to hearing norms on the Stanford Achievement Test-Word Meaning subtest. However, Marcy did not follow the trend of typical deaf students in her ability to comprehend what she read. While she scored within the low-average range


on the Woodcock Reading Passage Comprehension subtest (20th percentile), she was within the highaverage range on the Gates-MacGinitie-Comprehension subtest (62nd percentile). The gap between her ability to select definitions for vocabulary words and to comprehend passages also occurred in the fifthand sixth-grade years. While there was no formal writing assessment during the fourth-grade year, Marcy was able to write in connected sentences when she was asked to complete short answers on a test about the book she had read with the hearing fourth graders. For example, when asked to give several reasons why the Titanic disaster should never have taken place, Marcy responded as follows (unedited): “This disaster should not taken place because capttain refused to slow down. There were not enough lifeboats, or life belts. Needed to more mowen and children from streege. It was unsinkable ship!!!” This was an improvement over third grade when she only listed information because she could not express herself in sentences. In summary, in Marcy’s fourth-grade year, it appears that she enjoyed reading and was an average narrative reader who could participate successfully in the reading activities of her hearing peers. Low-average language skills seemed to contribute to the challenge she experienced with expository text and while writing beyond the sentence level.

Fifth Grade: Narrative and Expository Reading Ability Is Achieved In fifth grade, Marcy was integrated with a teacher of the deaf into most school subjects. For the first time, she was considered a fifth grader who went to the resource room rather than a resource-room student who came into the general classroom as in years past. As a fifth grader, Marcy returned to the resource room for reading and writing tutorials. Examples of concepts of print from this year included the use of the pronunciation guides in her social studies textbook and how to type e-mail addresses. She saw the speechlanguage pathologist 30 minutes a day for spelling— using the district curriculum adopted the previous year. Marcy practiced articulating her spelling words and listened to sentences containing them. As evi-

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denced in the editing sheet Marcy used throughout the year during process writing, it was clear that she was expected to attend to spelling, apply spelling rules and known patterns, and check for punctuation, capitalization, and so on. Marcy read novels with her class in fifth grade, such as Cracker Jackson (Byers, 1985) and Bridge to Terabithia (Paterson, 1972). According to the general education teacher, Marcy demonstrated ample evidence of comprehension during book discussions with peers and responded appropriately to questions posed about text structure. She also made predictions and interpreted personality traits of main characters. Marcy wrote short answers to comprehension questions, and although she did not always use correct English grammar, she was able to write explicitly enough to earn the majority of points possible on her assignments. Her teacher reported that she also demonstrated evidence of comprehension during social studies and science lectures, completed applied projects and research reports, and gave required class speeches (phrases of which had to be reverse interpreted if her speech was not clear). However, Marcy still had difficulty comprehending the school subject textbooks or information from the Internet without linguistic mediation by the teacher of the deaf (see Table 7 for percentile scores). Marcy wrote for several purposes during the fifthgrade year and liked most to write letters to her grandmother. Her letters were usually a page or so in length and interesting to a reader who did not know Marcy’s daily routines and current interests. She liked to experiment with different lettering styles as she wrote, using different sizes and shapes of letters to emphasize particular words. At school, Marcy also wrote book reports, response papers to text she read for academic subjects, and journal entries. She participated in Writer’s Workshop with her hearing classmates and conferenced with the general education teacher. Hearing peers edited her work, as did the teacher of the deaf and the general education teacher. Because Marcy had difficulty with word choice and grammar when she wrote, the teacher of the deaf designed writing activities based on the novel the class was reading. These often involved further use of vocabulary words or figurative expressions taken from the story that were not familiar to Marcy. She was asked to

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use these new words and phrases to describe situations first related to the story and then unrelated to it. Sometimes grammatical constructions discussed while reading were purposely practiced later in the week using content from social studies and science topics. These constructions were listed and sent home on Friday, so that Marcy’s parents could use them over the weekend. Both at home and school, Marcy also demonstrated that she was an avid reader. Her bedroom was well stocked with a variety of reading materials, and she often discussed new academic concepts with her parents. She loved reading and discussing ideas, often including the phrase, “I didn’t know that,” with a sense of awe. Two activities are provided to exemplify how teachers and parents discussed literacy-related material with Marcy and to illustrate her familiarity with the process of reflective questioning, in which she is helped to find an answer rather than simply told one. In the first example, Marcy tells her mother that she does not understand the word “illiterates” in the story she is reading. When her mother looks over to begin a conversation about it, Marcy flips over a piece of paper and picks up a pencil, knowing “the routine” and that these things will be needed. Her mother writes the word “literature” on the paper Marcy has provided and asks her what it means. As Marcy correctly responds, her mother circles the letters “lit.” Next, they discuss that her mother has been working on lectures at home about “literacy.” Marcy says that the word means “reading” and writes “literacy” beneath “literature” so that the common letters are in alignment. When her mother references the word “illiterates” again and asks what “il” means, Marcy quickly replies “not, like in illegal— not legal.” Then, not waiting to be asked, Marcy looks again at the target word and says, “It means not reading.” At this point, her mother smiles, tells her she is very close, and they refer to the book to discuss the word “illiterates” in the context of the passage. The second example is a conversation Marcy had with her mother near the end of her fifth-grade year while independently reading the newspaper: Marcy: It says here, it’s the turn of the millennium (fingerspelled). What’s millennium mean? Mom: It’s like million, M-I-L (fingerspelled), but it means that almost a thousand years have gone by. What’s the year right now?

Marcy: 1999. Mom: Right. And when it’s New Year’s, what will the year be? Marcy: 2000. Mom: Right, so it is the end of the 1900s, and it will turn to 2000—a new millennium. What do you think “turn of the century” means? At the midyear fifth-grade IEP meeting, it was reported that Marcy’s speech was comprehensible to an unfamiliar listener 75% of the time when she was talking about narrative and expository texts. To calculate this data, the speech-language pathologist videotaped Marcy discussing a story she read and a science topic she had studied. The speech-language pathologist then asked an unfamiliar noneducator to listen to Marcy without watching her on the TV monitor and to repeat what she was saying. It was evident that Marcy now understood the value of articulate speech, took pride in her ability to independently order in a restaurant, follow directions to the restroom, and locate desired items in stores. But, as important, if she was required to give a book report or a presentation on something she had studied, Marcy was confident in her ability to be understood. She knew how to question her audience to ensure that they were understanding what she was saying, and she knew repair strategies to utilize should they be needed (e.g., provided synonyms, reworded, demonstrated, etc.). As in past years, Marcy’s receptive vocabulary only improved minimally (PPVT 25th percentile in fifth grade, as compared to 20th percentile in fourth grade) and remained in the low-average range. Basically, this meant she was making a year’s progress in a year’s time, but never more. Expressively, Marcy improved in her ability to deal with aspects of decontextualized language. For example, on the CELF-Word Classes subtest she scored at the 37th percentile in fourth grade and improved to the 50th percentile in fifth grade. She also scored in the high-average range on the LPT Attributes subtest (89th percentile) and in the low-average range on three other LPT semantic subtests. On the Similarities and Differences subtests, Marcy scored in the belowaverage range, largely because she did not have the grammar to express the comparisons required. However, her total score on the LPT, which taps depth of


word knowledge, was within the high-average range (56th percentile) and was her strongest performance to date. On the district CBA, Marcy’s teacher reported that she did “well” on the narrative section compared to her fifth-grade hearing peers. She officially was rated to “be a strong performer” on both the narrative and expository portions of the measure, an improvement compared to past years. Marcy’s achievement as reported by her teacher was corroborated by standardized reading test scores that again fell in the average range at the end of fifth grade (e.g., Gates-MacGinitie Vocabulary 35th percentile, and Comprehension 63rd percentile). Similar results were obtained using the Woodcock Reading Mastery subtests, demonstrating an improvement from fourth to fifth grade. Thus, she had not reached a plateau in her reading abilities, as most deaf students do (Paul, 1998). An examination of the items Marcy missed on the Gates-MacGinitie Vocabulary subtest revealed that she often selected a word associated with—but not a synonym for—the target word. For example, given the target word mystery, Marcy’s answered “detective”; the correct answer was “secret.” Marcy comprehended a variety of text types on the Gates-MacGinitie Comprehension measure, that although short in length, included seven expository pieces, three narrative stories, one biography, and a poem. She had difficulty with some of the expository and descriptive passages, which were never more than about three paragraphs in length, and with the poem. With regard to writing in fifth grade, Marcy scored four “5s” and two “4s” on the Kansas state six-trait writing assessment. This suggests that she demonstrated above-average ability, since a “3” score is considered an average mark on the assessment rubric. Teachers in the district who could identify neither student nor school scored the writing samples.

Sixth Grade: Reading to Learn Our data collection ends with Marcy’s sixth-grade year, her last year in the public, neighborhood elementary school that she had attended since preschool (9 years). As a sixth grader, she again was tutored in the resource room and went to the speech-language pathologist for spelling. Books she read in sixth grade in-

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cluded Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (Coerr, 1986), Ferret in the Bedroom, Lizards in The Fridge (Wallace, 1986), and Tuck Everlasting (Babbitt, 1975). Her teacher of the deaf targeted five vocabulary words from a novel and five from school subject textbooks each week and asked Marcy to provide characteristics, associations, synonyms, and antonyms for the words as in the previous years. Word derivations and the meaning of the words were discussed and added to her wordwork notebook, as had also been done for the past 3 years. Marcy was required to use each new term in a sentence, as a form of oral rehearsal, and then write the sentence correctly. Thus, she was pushed a little further each year to apply word-level decoding, word meaning, and spelling strategies (see Table 8 for scores). Guided reading occurred several times a week in the resource room, so that the teacher of the deaf could facilitate higher-level thinking skills and metacognition. She developed a monitoring sheet to track conversations involving synthesis, analysis, and evaluation of ideas from the novels. Specific practice with the grammar to express these kinds of thoughts was written by the teacher of the deaf and discussed (e.g., “China and Japan are similar because . . .” or “China and Japan are different in that China . . .”). Marcy was then asked to use these constructions in her own writing about the novel. The same tasks were completed using social studies and science content. For example, on the teacher’s tracking sheet for “evaluation,” she indicated that she and Marcy discussed how Marcy felt about the way the nomads were treated in India. Sometimes Marcy was asked to combine sentences using specific conjoining words, such as otherwise, unless, while, however, although, and whenever based on the novel that the class was reading or a school subject topic. The conjoining words were from the OWLS, a test of receptive and expressive language on which Marcy barely scored within the low-average range (16th percentile). An example from the teacher’s explicit instruction sheet was as follows: “Combine these sentences—The sun is an average star. The sun is a huge ball of gas.” A writing sample from the sixth-grade year was gathered the last week of the school and is included below. It was taken from an application for a music scholarship for which Marcy applied. Although the use of a hyphenated word and the use of the convention for the

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word “with” would not be expected in this formal context, we find their use illustrative of Marcy’s continued awareness of challenging concepts of print. There is evidence of within word spelling (Bear et. al., 1996) difficulties as well. In addition, our experience is that Marcy’s emergent use of suffixes (e.g., “ist,” “al,” “tion,” “ment,” and “ful”) is uncommon when compared to the writing of most deaf children and reflective of the SEE language to which she was exposed. Marcy’s attempt to use complex sentence structures was also a positive indication that she independently attempted to use the more difficult English practiced with her teacher of the deaf during the year. One of my most memory was playing “Perpetural Motion” for the Mother’s Day Tea at my school. I suceeded in that tea party. When I were done w/ that song, everyone were clapping and made me feel good. If I keep playing, I will get good complianments and will become a suceeful celloist. Marcy was given the LPT expressive semantic test in the middle of her sixth-grade year by the school speech-language pathologist. She scored in the lowaverage range on five subtests: Associations, Similarities, Multiple Meanings, Attributes, and Categorization (49th percentile), which was about at the mean. Overall, she improved compared to the previous year on all subtests except Attributes. Marcy’s total LPT score also fell in the low-average range (44th percentile). Her score on the Difference subtest was in the above-average range and was much higher than the previous year (66th percentile, compared to 13th percentile). Marcy was also administered the OWLS midyear in sixth grade. Her Listening Comprehension subtest score was barely low-average (16th percentile), but her score on the Oral Expression subtest much better (39th percentile). The combination of the two scores was also low-average and an improvement compared to her score in fourth grade (13th percentile), the last time she took this test. The age-equivalent for Marcy’s total OWLS indicated a 2-year delay in cognitive-academic language proficiency. Marcy’s reading achievement was measured several ways in sixth grade. On the CBA, she was rated as a “strong performer” at both mid- and end-of-the-year

assessments. She scored 100% and 80% on these evaluations. She was rated as a “progressing reader” on comprehension of expository text at the midyear (79%) and a “strong performer” in May (87%). In addition, Marcy earned a 100% score on the “study skills/ information resources” measure, a 100% on the “listening comprehension” measure, and a 96% on the “construction of meaning” measure at the end of her sixth-grade year. Marcy’s scores on standardized measures of reading comprehension parallel the sixth-grade performance assessments of the district (CBA). She scored within the high-average range on the Illinois Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) Passage Comprehension subtest (65th percentile) and at the mean on the Woodcock Reading Mastery comprehension subtest (Woodcock, 1998). Achievement on reading vocabulary measures was mixed (Woodcock 59th percentile, ITBS 24th percentile). Toward the end of the year, all district sixth graders wrote a composition, without teacher assistance, given a choice of several topics. The teacher of the deaf, who observed Marcy begin the writing assignment, reported that she was pleased to see Marcy independently draw a graphic organizer to chart her ideas before beginning to write. Samples were sent to the district administration for blind review by a team of trained raters who used the state-mandated six-trait rubric. For four traits (ideas and content, organization, voice, and sentence fluency), Marcy scored a “3,” but she scored a “2” for her use of conventions and a “1” for word choice. On the Written Expressive Scale of the OWLS, which she wrote when she was exactly 12 years old, Marcy received a standard score of 107, an age equivalent of 12.0 years, and grade equivalent of sixth grade. To summarize Marcy’s sixth-grade year, it can be reported that most of both her receptive and expressive cognitive-academic language abilities were within the low-average range, and she was an average reader of both narrative and expository text when compared to hearing peers and norms. Her academic writing skills were also average when compared to hearing norms but reflected the vocabulary challenges she had faced continually throughout the elementary years. Marcy’s educational team met in May 2000, for a


transitional meeting to prepare for middle school. They felt that Marcy had developed the cognitiveacademic language abilities to succeed when educated with her peers and recommended that she be enrolled in the general curriculum for all subjects in middle school, going to the resource room to be tutored by a teacher of the deaf for one period daily.

Case Study Summary We described 9 years of language and literacy development of a deaf child, Marcy, who had no language and no literacy-related experiences, when she began preschool at 4 years of age. Although Marcy scored low in language in the early grades and was able to read commensurate with her peers as a beginning reader, assessment-based language and literacy instruction became more critical as the demands of reading increased in the middle elementary grades. Initially, Marcy scored higher on narrative measures of comprehension than she did on expository measures, but by fifth grade, she read both genres commensurate with her hearing peers (see Table 9 for district CBA scores). Marcy was the recipient of excellent reading instruction in a public-school system throughout the elementary years. Responsible professionals simultaneously assessed, monitored, and integrated several areas of communication and literacy, using effective teaching methodology to emphasize word recognition and comprehension. They planned daily, individualized, interactive activities always connected to the curriculum and supported by the research literature. Several aspects of these lessons were reinforced at home. Just as the challenges of the reading task are different at different stages/phases of development, lessons were focused differently at the various reading stages. When looking at Marcy’s language and literacy across the years, it becomes clear that research-based instruction resulted in reading achievement atypical of deaf students. As a preschool and kindergarten student, Marcy, as most children, was at the emergent reader stage. The emphasis on phonological awareness and English-language enhancement provided the foundation for Marcy’s success as a beginning reader. As Marcy moved from being an emergent reader to actually reading on her own in first grade, team mem-

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bers were guided by the research on how word learning develops during this period, and they planned reading lessons and language intervention using typical firstgrade guided reading materials. Emphasis initially was on teaching Marcy to segment, isolate, and blend speech sounds whenever she could to decode words. As she progressed in first grade, emphasis turned to use of orthographic patterns. From the start, Marcy was taught to employ multiple strategies (e.g., phonemic, semantic, and structural cues; rereading; etc.) to unlock unknown words. As a beginning reader, Marcy was assisted in comprehending first at the word level, then at the phrase level, and finally with larger chunks of text. She was helped to see the advantage of using multiple strategies when she did not comprehend the language of text. In addition, team members focused on the need to go beyond the preschool and kindergarten emphasis on basic informal, routine language, and they began to attend to the decontextualized, cognitive-academic language required to succeed in school. Marcy moved into the “Growing Independence” stage late in first grade. She had a bank of words that she knew by sight, as well as basic word-recognition and comprehension strategies. Marcy was assisted to use morphology to recognize words and to comprehend what she was reading at this transitional phase. The opportunity to hear (see) and use these grammatical aspects of English seemed especially important at this time. By second grade, Marcy’s ability to retell a piece was emphasized, and her narrative comprehension was average or higher when compared to hearing peers thereafter. While Marcy was generally successful with narrative text early in her reading development, semantic issues continued to challenge her attempts to comprehend some aspects of narrative. Acknowledging her semantic weaknesses, teachers designed reading lessons that included discussion of the many levels of meaning associated with vocabulary words, figurative phrases, and sentences. Syntactic weaknesses were specifically noted and their development facilitated as well. The semantic and syntactic emphases continued over the years and shifted to meet the demands of text. Attention to the decontextualized, cognitiveacademic language required to succeed in school started in first grade and continued into the intermediate grades, when Marcy’s reading challenges were pri-

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marily expository text, typical of the “Reading to Learn” phase (Gunning, 1996). As Marcy encountered more vocabulary, more atypical vocabulary, and more complex grammatical constructions, her teachers continued to create explicit language lessons that utilized school subject text as the context of lessons. Growth of semantics and syntax was facilitated through mediated conversations about more sophisticated concepts of print, text structures, unfamiliar content area concepts, and graphics common to expository text using language that was not a part of Marcy’s familiar, personal, “oral” language repertoire.

Conclusion In this study, a student who did not demonstrate the same phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic language skills as her typically developing peers was assisted to acquire age-appropriate language and literacy skills. Despite the fact that Marcy did not have a first language or any literacy exposure until the age of 4, she made significant progress. We believe that Marcy’s dramatic literacy progress was due to two reasons: use of grammatically accurate decontextualized English and consistently high quality research-based reading instruction. Detailed knowledge of her education might assist those teaching hearing students as well as deaf students, because all beginning readers in this country face the same alphabetic written language and the same complex English-language structures that may hinder their development as readers if not addressed via instruction. We hope that our case study documents the significant difference educators knowledgeable in research-based reading instruction made in the literacy development of a child. Our experience working with a variety of students (urban poor, ESL, and learning and language disabled) who do not read well is that all students who do not read on grade level would benefit from the manner in which Marcy’s language and reading abilities were regularly assessed and the type of instruction provided and constantly adjusted. Although we feel the results of the 9 years of progress we document are impressive, we also feel that they are obtainable for all children. We believe that teachers can make an important difference in the acquisition of language and literacy for all stu-

dents, and we hope that the topic of the languageliteracy connection will be given more careful consideration by professionals in the field. Received March 11, 2001; revisions received August 13, 2001; accepted August 15, 2001

Appendix 1 A Description of Measures Used in This Study Listening (Audition) Assessment 1. Audiometric Tests. Marcy’s hearing acuity was tested while not using equipment (i.e., unaided), while wearing binaural hearing aids, and while using a cochlear implant. Testing occurred at least annually during the data collection period. 2. Developmental Approach to Successful Listening–II (Stout & Windle, 1992). The DASL test includes a placement test and a section of activities. This test allows a variety of subskills to be assessed at the Sound Awareness or detection level (e.g., the child indicates when sound is present or not); at the Phonetic or discrimination level (e.g., can discriminate between a whisper, quiet, and loud speech); the Identification level (e.g., can identify Amy from Ashley); and Comprehension level (e.g., can follow a direction containing three critical elements). Speech Articulation Assessment 1. Ling Phonetic Level and the Ling Phonological Level Speech Evaluation (Ling, 1976). These measures were designed by Ling to informally assess the ability of children who are deaf or hard of hearing to produce phonemes and vowels (at the phonetic level) and speech articulation during conversation (phonological level). They are not standardized, but a percent correct is figured by dividing the total number of skills demonstrated by the total number of items. 2. Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation (Goldman & Fristoe, 1986). This test provides information about an individual’s ability to articulate initial, medial, and final phonemes sampled in both spontaneous and imitative productions at the word and sentence level. Hearing norms are provided for 35 common speech sounds.


3. Speech Intelligibility. Judgments made by adults who were unfamiliar with the speech of deaf children were collected annually by the school speech-language pathologist. Receptive English Language Assessment 1. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-R; PPVT-III ) (Dunn & Dunn, 1981, 1997). The PPVT is a receptive measure of English. The student is asked to point to a single vocabulary item given four pictures. The test is standardized on hearing children. 2. Assessing Semantic Skills Through Everyday Themes (Barrett, Zachman, & Huisingh, 1988). The ASSET requires the child to identify labels, categories, attributes, functions, and definitions. It tests the same skills expressively. The test is standardized on hearing children. 3. Clinical Evaluation of (English) Language Fundamentals-Revised (Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 1989, 1995). Initially, the CELF-Revised (1989) was administered to the subject. In 1995, it was replaced by the CELF-3, a newer version of the test. The titles of most of the subtests remained the same, but the Oral Directions subtest was renamed Concepts and Directions on the CELF-3. Not every subtest was administered to the subject, nor were the same subtests given every year. The test is standardized on hearing children. Expressive English Language Assessment 1. Test of Language Development (TOLD-P, TOLD-2) (Newcomer & Hammill, 1982, 1988). The TOLD is highly similar to the CELF. The TOLD-P, Primary, is designed for ages 4–8:11, and the TOLD2, Intermediate, for children ages 8:6–12:11. Subtests include Sentence Structure and Word Structure. The test is standardized on hearing children. 2. Language Processing Test (Richard & Hanner, 1990). The LPT assesses both expressive decontextualized skills through several subtests: Associations, Categorization, Similarities, Differences, and Attributes. The test is normed on hearing children. 3. Assessing Semantic Skills Through Everyday Themes (ASSET) (Barrett, Zachman, & Huisingh, 1988). This test is described above. 4. Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test

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(Gardner, 1983). The EOWPVT is an expressive vocabulary test that requires the student to label pictures that she is shown. Standard scores are not available. The test is standardized on hearing children. 5. The Clinical Evaluation of (English) Language Fundamentals-Revised (Semel, Wiig, Secord, 1989, 1995). The following CELF-3 expressive subtests were used: Word Classes, Word Structure, Formulated Sentences, and Recalling Sentences. 6. Oral and Written Language Scale, Listening Comprehension Scale (Carrow-Woolfolk, 1995). The OWLS includes a variety of expressive and written subtests. The OWLS skills are assessed in a manner that is more cognitively challenging than the LPT or CELF. The test is standardized on hearing children. Reading Assessments 1. Informal Reading Related Measures. Three of Clay’s (1993) Observation Survey tasks (i.e., Concepts About Print, Dictation, and Letter Identification) and a test of phonemic awareness (Taylor, 1989) were administered. These tests are not standardized. 2. Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery (Woodcock & Johnson, 1989). This measure assesses four basic areas: Reading, Mathematics, Written Language, and Knowledge. The test is test is standardized on hearing children. 3. Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (Woodcock, 1998). The measure consists of six subtests: Visual-Auditory Learning, Letter Identification, Word Identification, Word Attack, Word Comprehension, and Passage Comprehension. The test is normed on hearing children. 4. Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test (GM) (MacGinitie & MacGinitie, 1989). This test consists of Vocabulary and Comprehension subtests presented in a multiple-choice format. The Gates-MacGinitie test is normed on hearing children. 5. Curriculum-Based Assessment (CBA). These tests were developed by the Olathe (Kansas) School District to measure reading comprehension using authentic narrative and expository passages. The student reads one narrative and one expository passage and writes answers to open-ended comprehension questions. This assessment was administered annually at midyear and at the end of the year using different pas-

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sages each time. Students are judged against their district peers’ performance. 6. Second Grade Retelling Project-Test Structure Analysis (Luetke-Stahlman, Montgomery, and Griffiths, 1998, 1999). English meaning, form and text structure elements were analyzed for 28 story retellings. 7. Quantitative Reading Inventory (Leslie and Caldwell, 1990) is an informal reading inventory consisting of narrative and expository passages graduated in difficulty from the primer to eighth grade level. Subjects read the passage and answer comprehension questions asked by the examiner.

Appendix 2 A Chronology of Marcy’s Developing Word Recognition Strategies in Grade One Evidence of a developing bank of sight words 10/6/95—This skill was evident early in Marcy’s ability to write familiar words. At the beginning of the year she wrote 9 words (5 of them names of family members) in a given 5 minute time frame. When writing sentences each day in reading lessons she wrote more and more words with no help. When asked to write as many words as you can in week 11 of lessons, Marcy began to write and sign words that were orthographically similar (dad, mad, had, mad; rat, cat, sat).

Evidence of using the chunks in words to unlock unknown words The KALL intervention teacher used unique teaching methods to get at the orthographic and morphological structures and other chunks in words. For example, Marcy knew hill so to get hilly the teacher added the sign marker for the sound at the end of hilly (long e sound). Then to get frilly the teacher made a visual association in order to connect hilly and frilly. In other words, since Marcy knew the word hilly and the sign for it, the teacher would substitute the handshape for the h of hilly with the handshape for f in the air where hilly was signed. In a sense she was making a visual connection for what hearing teachers would make for an auditory association when two things rhyme. In another example, Marcy knew grin so in order to get Grindy the teacher signed grin plus the handshape d plus the handshape y. Marcy started to use these strategies on her own when she signed the word hilarious (1/ 10) by using the sign for hill plus the sign for air plus the handshape for the letter e plus the sign for us. Evidence of self-correcting 10/12/95—Marcy read doors as door then selfcorrected. On the same day she self-corrected glass for glasses. Evidence of reading for meaning (substitutions that made sense)

Evidence of using some aspects of sound

11/21/95—Marcy read said for yelled.

11/15/95—Example of use of initial and medial sound but not ending sound (win for with).

Novel strategy

11/21/95—Evidence of using initial consonant and meaning (large for long). 12/22/95—Spontaneously said that hush, hat, and help started the same.

10/29/95—Marcy made up a sign for crash and a sign for flash. In other words, when she did not know a word she used a place holder. Occasionally she would create such a place-holder sign and then state aloud, “Whatever!”

1/11/95—Used the sign by for the word buy. Evidence of developing metacognition Evidence of segmenting and blending Marcy was also able to sound out the word tent, evidence that she was beginning to incorporate the direction commonly used in lessons, Stretch it out. How many sounds do you hear? What letter goes with the first sound?, etc.

From the beginning, the KALL intervention teacher worked to get Marcy to use strategies and explain which strategy she used as she unlocked unknown words. For a while Marcy responded randomly with the strategy terminology for example, she signed It


made sense when it did not make sense. At first, Marcy focused almost exclusively on the print cues and her mistakes would be close in terms of features of the word (supper, summer; quiet, quite; became, because) but her choices would not make sense in the sentence. The intervention teacher worked tirelessly to convince Marcy to make sure her choices made sense. On December 7 Marcy said she looked at the picture and tried it out in the sentence to see if it made sense, and it did. In the second half of grade one Marcy made fewer errors that did not make sense and when she did they were generally for longer words (everybody). If the teacher would cover up part of the word and show her how she could deal with one part at a time, Marcy was more successful. In February of first grade Marcy began to explain how she figured things out that clearly demonstrated she was using a variety of strategies. For example, she could be specific about some aspect of a picture that helped her make sense or a word part that supported her efforts to figure out a word. Data sources for Appendix 2: teacher’s lesson plan notes and videotapes of lessons.

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