Reading, Special Education, and Deaf Children
Supalla & Byrne
and must tell students about the expansion. In addition, other words coded in green may have an
ASL equivalent such as “house” and “see”, yet they are not decodable. The teacher has to
demonstrate the ASL signs by showing the sign equivalents through a translation for deaf children.
Once again, the situation with ASL gloss is different as deaf children have full control over
the text. Recall the RABBIT sentence example, and the use of decoding as an empowering act for
deaf children. Teachers who are trained in ASL gloss understand that deaf children must not
develop a dependency on them for the identification of English words. In other words, children
must learn to read signs written in the ASL-phabet and use the RB. Reading any glossed book is
also liberating for deaf children as the text itself is consistent with how ASL operates
morphologically and syntactically.
It warrants exploring how deaf children are assessed for their reading skills through ASL
support. With the running record, a number of deaf education experts (e.g., Chaleff & Ritter, 2001;
Easterbrooks & Huston, 2008) advocate examining deaf children's signing ASL while reading in
English. Bailes (2001) even suggests having deaf children translate while reading English, which
is erroneously deemed as an appropriate form of 'oral reading'. There are potential problems
associated with having deaf children translate English text as part of their 'reading' development
experience (Cripps, 2008).
With ASL support, a deaf child reading an English text needs to produce the best possible
translation in ASL to demonstrate a level of 'reading' performance in English via the running
record. Conceptual accuracy helps with measuring deaf students' 'reading' performance and good
translation skills are measured through a high equivalence of concepts between the languages. The
problem is that translation is not the same as reading. Early on, Stewart and Kluwin (2001) took
up the position and stated that doing a running record with deaf students through translation will
undermines the validity of any reading fluency assessment.
Yet, as part of a large scale reading research project with the deaf student population in the
United States, deaf education experts, with support from the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S.
Department of Education, (Easterbrooks et al., 2015) make testing plans as follows:
Reading Fluency Assessment. In this assessment, [deaf] children must read
(using...sign language) three [English] passages (from Engelmann & Bruner,
1995...) within a prescribed time...The child's reading is video-recorded and later
rated by means of a miscue analysis. Words per minute and correct words per
minute are also calculated. The child is also rated on performance using the Signed
Reading Fluency Rubric for Deaf Children when appropriate (Easterbrooks &
Huston, 2008). (p. 426)
The intentions as described are clear about having deaf children translate the English
passages and their performance is assessed for reading skills at the same time. The mention of a
measure for examining signed reading fluency among deaf children is worthy of elaboration. The
name of the measure 'signed reading fluency' is misleading as it suggests that deaf students'
performance is focused on reading; however, it is actually a translation task. A more accurate
methodology includes administering a running record that includes glossed passages and have deaf
children read the passages and sign in ASL (including the use of the RB as needed). It is only
through an ASL text that the accuracy of reading words and sentences reflects an accurate
assessment, and the concept of signed reading fluency would be appropriately pursued.
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No.1 – Spring/Summer 2018
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