Technology Advancement with Reading for Deaf Students Abbie Currie, Presenter

My Background Teacher of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing for 5 years Currently in progress of working towards a Masters in Education with certification as a Reading Specialist

Deafness It is known as a low incidence disability –Deafness, as its own disability, is quite rare compared to Deafness received from complications of other health related issues When it comes to looking at instructing students with a hearing loss, reading and writing are the two main deficits children face in their academics

Deafness The students in my school come in with a wide variety in language skill and ability – Deaf from Deaf Come in to school using sign language and approaches learning as an ESL learner –Deaf from Hearing (TC) Come in to school using Total Communication which incorporates both voice and sign – instruction occurs as sign language through English word order –Deaf from Hearing (Oral) Come in to school being raised as a hearing child through voice alone, no sign language Many have cochlear implants

My Research My research lead me to many articles and websites that were beneficial. The main article that I received a great deal of information from was Technology to Support Literacy Strategies for Students Who Are Deaf written by Maurice McInerney, Kevin Riley, and David Osher

Technology to Support Literacy Strategies for Students Who Are Deaf It outlines the idea of six different projects that were studied which included two that dealt with “captioning technology” examining “the effects of caption style and presentation rate on reading comprehension and viewer preferences” and four projects that dealt with computers in how “the independent variable was the computer intervention, while the dependent variable was reading comprehension, vocabulary recall, or some other measure of literacy” (McInerney, 7).

Learning to Read We typically are instructing the basic phonemic and fluency development and how we emphasize breaking down words into their cores and treating words as clusters of sounds when teaching students to read Most of the English language is learned through auditory means. Students also learn through background knowledge

How Deaf Students Learn to Read Deaf students have an extreme limit to the sounds of the English language Deaf students lack an internalized auditory-based language

How Deaf Students Learn to Read Hearing students are able to grow in their reading and writing ability as they grow because they are constantly immersed in an auditory environment and learn as they hear. Their vocabulary expands and thus their language ability expands. As deaf students grow, the gap widens for them.

Reading Fluency Deaf students primarily learn literacy in social contexts Exposure – to a wide range of printed materials in “print-rich environments” Demonstration – of written, finger-spelled, and sign language and the relationship among these three Opportunity – to experiment with reading and writing in a risk-free and supportive setting

Television and Video Captioning Captioning in the home allows students to learn literacy in the natural environment, while captioning in classrooms allows teachers to focus on broad text concepts and directed instructional environments.

Television and Video Captioning Lessons can be made from cartoons, situation comedies, documentaries, and much more Teachers help students learn more in the areas of “building vocabulary, and comprehension, finding main ideas, predicting what happens next, identifying characters, drawing conclusions, and locating information” (Koskinen, Welch, Jensema, & Alexander, 1988).

Television and Video Captioning “During a typical reading lesson using captioned video, the teacher’s role is to direct student viewing of the text, and to highlight particular key vocabulary and content throughout the course of the lesson” (McInerney, Riley, & Osher, 1999). The teacher also provides students with printed copies of the captioned text so that ongoing practice can continue.

Writing and Reading Comprehension For Deaf students, we know that from various studies, second-language learners benefit from pre-reading strategies in their native language in order to extend their background knowledge and activate new knowledge important to the text at hand.

Computer Software for Deaf Readers Students now have the opportunity to translate short ASL video stories into written English captions, and then apply those to the stories at hand –This kind of activity involves the use of videocassette recorders, monitors, edit software, and the ability to synchronize text to the video. –Even more astonishing is the fact that computers are now capable of showing high quality sign language on the screen. Facial expressions of the speaker are captured as well as body positions, which is key in understanding sign language.

Computer Software for Deaf Readers HandsOn was created in collaboration between IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and at the University of California, San Diego –This project gives a bilingual approach to instruction of language for children who are deaf –The student “watches a 3 to 6 ½ minute story in ASL, then reads the same story in English

As he reads the story, text is displayed one or two sentences at a time, and the student has the option of viewing a signed translation of each segment before progressing to the next segment. The student then answers questions about the story in English or writes his own English captions to accompany the ASL version of the story

HandsOnHandsOn uses web technologies to present videos of stories signed in American Sign Language (ASL) along with English translations of the stories. Based on earlier software that focused on teaching reading and writing skills to deaf children proficient in ASL, HandsOn is an innovative reading and writing program that combines ASL with English in a variety of learning contexts. It affords students a unique opportunity to interact with English and ASL in the context of these reading and writing tasks, avoiding standard pitfalls of dictionary approaches to learning the correspondences between the two language. The reading and writing tasks require students to interact alternately with English and ASL using sentence contexts.

Computer Software for Deaf Readers Another work was created by E. Hansen and is offered for middle to secondary students to support their variety of language modes. The computer screen is shown in three windows – “one for scrollable passage text, one for questions the student is expected to answer, and another for either of two sign language versions of the text to be displayed in motion video” (Hansen, 1992).

Computer Software for Deaf Readers In Project LITERACY-HI, Anderson-Inman and fellow colleagues developed electronic textbooks. –Key words are underlined and a student that uses the program can click on a key word and have a box appear with six options: sounds, ASL, translations, picture, animation, definitions, and explanations. –This program is often embedded into laptop computers that secondary students can then carry with them throughout their mainstream classes.

An important note to remember is that it “is not the type of media that determines how the various resources impact students’ comprehension. It is the function that the resources play that allows students to comprehend text better” (McInerney, Riley, & Osher, 1999).

Thank You!