TITLE:
Early Reading for Young Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children: Alternative Frameworks
AUTHORS:
Jean F. Andrews, Beth Hamilton, Kim Misener Dunn, M. Diane Clark
KEYWORDS:
Deaf, Top-Down Reading Strategies, ASL/English Bilingual Approaches
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.7 No.4,
April
14,
2016
ABSTRACT:
Deaf children can develop reading skills by using a visual language to
bridge meaning to English print without the use of English auditory phonology.
To this end, five deafcentric frameworks are described that take into account
the use of visual language and visual learning, as well as the use of deaf
cultural role models in the teaching of reading. Moving away from the deficit
model, these frameworks focus on Deaf1 students in the act of reading in order
to document their actual behaviors using a bilingual American Sign
Language/English philosophy. These five models suggest that there is more
involved in reading than simply bottom-up code-based strategies based on spoken
language. Multiple pathways are recommended, based on the work of Treisman, and
his idea of “fault tolerant” approaches, which permit and encourage multiple
pathways for deaf readers.