Reading, Special Education, and Deaf Children
Supalla & Byrne
experience any schooling, for example. This has clearly changed with the advent of special
education (Gargiulo, 2009). Supports understandably become attractive by providing information
and activities and children with cognitive impairments are given a chance to participate in the
education process. While deaf children as a group are not considered cognitively impaired, they
appear to be victimized by the lack of attention to their cognition.
In any case, the priority for this article is to develop more exact understanding deaf children
as a group. Only after addressing the learning needs of deaf children, can any beneficial systematic
change in American education can happen. There are other significant issues associated with
special education that need to be investigated as well. For example, special education's emphasis
on the individualized education design has implications for ASL gloss. It is easy to imagine that
the needs of deaf children as a group are not valued when educators focus solely on individuals,
for example. What seems clear at this point is that deaf children as a group have common needs.
Among these are key concepts for realizing best practices for teaching reading to deaf children
include: 1) Status of ASL as a signed language; 2) Significance of text manipulation; and 3) ASL
gloss as an effective methodology.
For the future, some scholars have urged for a model of signed language education that
serves as a new extension of special education (e.g., Cripps & S. Supalla, 2012; Padden, 2003;
Padden & Rayman, 2002; Rosen, 2017). This may allow for the creation and formalization of
Kindergarten through 12th grade education that incorporates ASL as the language of instruction.
At present, deaf children desperately need an effective way to learn to read English texts and ASL
gloss is poised as a reading instruction approach that is sensitive to the linguistic comprehension
and decoding needs for the education of deaf children. One way or another, all children, with or
without disabilities, deserve the opportunity to become fluent readers and to achieve that, attention
needs to focus on best practices for deaf children and learning to read.
References
Abdulghafoor, M. S., Ahmad, A., & Huang, J-Y. (2015). Literacy sign language application
using visual phonics: A theoretical framework. International Journal of Web-Based
Learning and Teaching Technologies, 10(4), 1-18.
Andrews, J. F., & Wang, Y. (2015). The qualitative similarity hypothesis: Research synthesis
and future directions. American Annals of the Deaf, 159(9), 468-483.
Bailes, C. N. (2001). Integrative ASL-English language arts: Bridging paths to literacy. Sign
Language Studies, 1(2), 147-174.
Bélanger, N. N., Mayberry, R. I., & Rayner, K. (2013). Orthographic and phonological preview
benefits: Parafoveal processing in skilled and less-skilled deaf readers. The Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(11), 2237-2252.
Brentari, D. (2002). Modality differences in sign language phonology and morphophonemics. In
R. Meier, K. Cormier, & D. Quinto-Pozos (Eds.), Modality and structure in signed and
spoken languages (pp. 35-64). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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