HOW TO TEACH DEAF PEOPLE HOW TO READ
What is American Sign Language (ASL)?
How does it help deaf people for their future learning?. These questions’
answers are the very beginning of this research topic. After that, this paper informs
the reader about deaf people’s social life, how they communicate, how they
read, how they learn by phonemes, phonology and etc. Let’s start with the first
question that often exists in this paper; what is American Sign Language?
The exact beginnings of American Sign Language are not clear. Many people believe that American Sign Language came mostly from French Sign Language (FSL). Others claim that the foundation for American Sign Language existed before French Sign Language was introduced in America in 1817, at the American School for the Deaf. It was in that year that a French teacher named Laurent Clerc, brought to the United States by Thomas Gallaudet, founded the first school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Clerc began teaching French Sign Language to Americans, though many of his students were already fluent in their own forms of local, natural sign language. Today's American Sign Language likely contains some of this early American signing. Which language had more to do with the formation of modern American Sign Language is difficult to prove. Modern American Sign Language and French Sign Language share some elements, including a substantial amount of vocabulary. However, they are not mutually comprehensible. ( anonymous http://wiki.medpedia.com/ASL. )
In the U.S., most deaf people prefer American Sign Language to English. American Sign Language is therefore the most commonly used language by deaf adults in the United States and Canada (Lane, Hoffmeister, & Bahan, 1996). It consists of a large variety of signs and words borrowed from English. However, it has a grammatical structure that is completely different from that of spoken English (Klima & Bellugi, 1979). Deaf children learn to sign as easily and spontaneously as hearing children learn to speak (Lillo-Martin, 1999). Because deaf people learn American Sign Language more easily than English, most have low English skills. (adapted from Lyuba Azbel)
By using deaf people who are fluent in American Sign Language in phonological information in word rhyming tasks, the information about the deaf read in the same way as the hearing exists and supported as a hypothesis.
Learning to Read English
The exact beginnings of American Sign Language are not clear. Many people believe that American Sign Language came mostly from French Sign Language (FSL). Others claim that the foundation for American Sign Language existed before French Sign Language was introduced in America in 1817, at the American School for the Deaf. It was in that year that a French teacher named Laurent Clerc, brought to the United States by Thomas Gallaudet, founded the first school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Clerc began teaching French Sign Language to Americans, though many of his students were already fluent in their own forms of local, natural sign language. Today's American Sign Language likely contains some of this early American signing. Which language had more to do with the formation of modern American Sign Language is difficult to prove. Modern American Sign Language and French Sign Language share some elements, including a substantial amount of vocabulary. However, they are not mutually comprehensible. ( anonymous http://wiki.medpedia.com/ASL. )
In the U.S., most deaf people prefer American Sign Language to English. American Sign Language is therefore the most commonly used language by deaf adults in the United States and Canada (Lane, Hoffmeister, & Bahan, 1996). It consists of a large variety of signs and words borrowed from English. However, it has a grammatical structure that is completely different from that of spoken English (Klima & Bellugi, 1979). Deaf children learn to sign as easily and spontaneously as hearing children learn to speak (Lillo-Martin, 1999). Because deaf people learn American Sign Language more easily than English, most have low English skills. (adapted from Lyuba Azbel)
By using deaf people who are fluent in American Sign Language in phonological information in word rhyming tasks, the information about the deaf read in the same way as the hearing exists and supported as a hypothesis.
Learning to Read English
The research on how children learn to
read is now clear on several points. Critical for present purposes is the conclusion
that phonological knowledge drives acquisition in at least two ways. Awareness
of phonemes as meaningless abstractions from the speech stream is important in
enabling children to learn to read. And phonological decoding strategies are
important in making progress in word identification. The evidence for these conclusions
is too extensive to be reviewed here, so we will merely stipulate the existence
of sufficient
evidence to warrant these fairly conservative conclusions: Children who are
successful in learning to read English learn that in the English writing system
letters (actually graphemes) correspond to speech sounds, and they use this
knowledge in actual reading. Even during the first grade, children who later
turn out to be more successful readers are those whose reading errors reflect attention
to phonology. Furthermore, the development of skill in reading is closely
linked to the child’s acquisition of phonemic awareness, a sensitivity to the
meaningless segments (phonemes) that are the abstract building blocks of the
phonological system. The National Research Council Report (1998) on the
Prevention of Reading Difficulties
in Young Children reviews much of the evidence on the linkage between learning to
read and phonological awareness. There is more to reading than this
phonological component, of course. And the other parts—the role of actual
reading experience, the attainment of automaticity in reading, and strategies
for comprehension—are very important in considering reading by deaf persons as
well. For now, we assert this conclusion about the important role of phonology
in learning to read English so that we can explore its relevance for deaf readers.
When
Deaf Readers Read English
The crux of the matter is this: How does
one learn to read in a language one does not know well? This problem
encompasses deaf readers for whom ASL or someSpelling. If deaf readers use
phonology in spelling, then one might expect that spelling errors, when they
are made, expose phonological process. Errors should preserve parts of the
word’s phonology rather than its visual appearance. However, the separation of
visual form and phonological form is very difficult in an
alphabetic writing system. If the word blue is misspelled as bleu,one might
suppose that is a simple visual error of reversing two letters. However, such
an error could equally well reflect difficulty in representing the letters that
spell the /U/ sound in blue. This problem of classifying spelling errors as if
they either do or do not re- flect phonology is nearly intractable in the
absence of independent knowledge of how the speller represents (spells) the
sounds. The exception to this dilemma comes when the spelling reflects illegal
spelling sequences that can be traced to phonological sources, as when squirrel
is spelled SKWRL. But such examples can provide evidence only for phonology,
not against it. There is another problem to consider in the classi-fication of
spelling errors. Spelling reflects letter sequencing, an ordering task executed
manually and with letter-by-letter feedback. In other words, there is a
coordination dimension of spelling, not just phonological and visual dimensions.
An error that is classified as “nonphonological” (buel for blue) may appear nonphonological
in its surface form. But the error could result from a sequencing error or a
subsequent failure of a verification process, with phonology already having been
involved in the initial stages of spelling. Given this problem, what do we make
of the studies on deaf readers’ spelling? One recent study by Aaron, Keetay,
Boyd, Palmatier, and Wacks (1998) was interpreted to show nonphonological
spelling in deaf children. In one task, in which participants spelled words in
sentence contexts, deaf children’s overall spelling accuracy was actually better
than that of an age-matched hearing control group; however, an error analysis
revealed that the two groups made very different kinds of
errors. The deaf children produced fewer phonologically acceptable misspellings
than did the hearing children; for example, bloo for the target word blue was
considered phonologically acceptable whereas buel was not (a problematic classification,
as indicated above). In another version of this task, the sentence contained
target words with one or more “silent” letters other sign language is their
first or primary language and deaf readers who, regardless of their ASL status, have
not acquired skill in a spoken language (such as English). If phonology—the
structure of speech sounds in a spoken language—is a fundamental level of
language structure onto which reading is scaffolded,
which is the conclusion that follows from the evidence summarized above, then a
child who lacks phonology faces an immediate obstacle in learning to read.
There are two general questions to pose in examining this obstacle. First, if
phonology is important in reading generally, then it might be important in
reading by deaf readers. The question then is whether successful deaf readers gain
their success partly through the use of a functional phonology, even if it is
not the full-blown phonological system available to hearing readers. The second
question, given an affirmative
answer to the first question, asks what implications follow for deaf literacy. We
address first the question of whether phonology might be functional for
successful deaf readers.
Can
Deaf Readers Use Phonology?
To address this question, we summarize
what we see in the research literature. Our review, which benefits from earlier
excellent reviews by Marschark and Harris (1996) and Alegria (1998), is
selective, targeted on experimental evidence that addresses the issue directly.
Infact, even the best evidence turns out to be inconsistent on the central
question of the use of phonology, and we attempt to sort out the
inconsistencies where we can. Evidence Against the Use of Phonology Much of the
evidence that argues against the use of phonology by deaf individuals comes
from research on spelling. In hearing readers, the evidence is that spelling is
accomplished not merely visually but by reference to phonology. There is a
reciprocal relationship between reading and spelling: Whereas reading converts
orthography to phonology, spelling converts phonology to spelling. (See Perfetti,
1997, for a discussion of the spelling-reading relationship). Thus, studies of spelling
may reveal deaf readers’ use of phonology just as studies of hearing readers
do.(e.g., the w in snow). The authors assumed that spelling errors that omitted
silent letters reflected a use of phonology. Again, the deaf individuals’
overall accuracy was comparable to that of the hearing individuals. However,
the error analysis indicated that the deaf participants were less likely than
the hearing participants to omit silent letters from the target words: deaf
students omitted only 38% of the silent letters whereas the hearing groups
omitted between 75% and 81%. These two findings—that deaf students failed to
make phonologically acceptable spelling errors, and that they tended not to
omit silent letters—were taken as evidence that the deaf students did not use
phonological cues in spelling to the same extent that the hearing children did.
Both findings replicated earlier conclusions based on different methods
(e.g., Bellugi, Taeng, Klima, & Fok, 1989; Corcoran, 1966; Dodd, 1980). A
particularly interesting comparison comes from a study by Fok and Bellugi
(1986), who analyzed the “spelling” errors made by Chinese deaf and Chinese hearing
children. Chinese spelling is interesting because it more successfully evades
the confound of how words look with how they sound (although not completely).
Although in Chinese spelling, the construction of a character is possible
without reference to phonology, Fok and Bellugi found that the spelling of hearing
children reflected use of phonology. The errors of the Chinese hearing children
in their study tended to be substitutions of one character for another having a
similar pronunciation but no visual similarity (errors of homophony). Such
results are consistent with studies of adult reading in Chinese, which find that
errors in written recall tend to be homophones (Zhang and Perfetti, 1993). In
contrast to the hearing participants, however, Fok and Bellugi’s deaf
participants made few homophone errors. Rather, the errors of Chinese deaf individuals
tended to be visually similar character substitutions, or “invented” characters
(nonexisting Chinese characters). Lexical decision. One needs evidence on the
phonology issue directly from reading tasks as well as from spelling. Even
without the use of phonology in spelling, one possibly would see it in reading.
One reading task that has been studied in both hearing and deaf readers is lexical
decision. In this task, a subject is presented, one 36 Journal of Deaf Studies
and Deaf Education 5:1 Winter 2000 at a time, with a series of printed letter
strings and asked whether each string is or is not a word. The general logic of
the lexical decision task has been that only a minimal contact with the mental
representation of the word is necessary for a positive decision. The individual
does not have to consider the meaning of the word. By manipulating properties
of the words and nonwords, lexical decision tasks aim to expose the
orthographic, phonological, and semantic influences in “lexical access,” the
process by which a reader accesses the information stored with the mental
representation of the word. One relevant result in lexical decision research
with hearing readers is that individuals make lexical decisions faster for regularly
spelled than for irregularly spelled words, at least for low-frequency words. A
regular spelling is one in which the letters of the word map onto their “regular”
or most common pronunciation (e.g., mint). An irregular spelling is one in
which one or more of the letters map onto irregular or less common pronunciation
(e.g., pint). Regularity effects
have traditionally been taken to demonstrate the role of letter to-phoneme
connections in reading, in effect,
evidence that subword phonology (letters and phonemes, rather than whole words)
is functional in word identification. And what of deaf readers making lexical
decisions? Waters and Doehring (1990) found that unlike hearing persons, deaf
individuals showed no regularity effect. Similarly, Beech and Harris
(1997) found that the lexical decisions of their deaf participants were less
likely than those of hearing participants to show effects of regularity
in reading words; they were also less affected by whether
nonwords were pseudo homophones— nonwords with the same pronunciations as real
words (e.g., baik)—or nonhomophones (e.g., boik). These findings were interpreted
as suggesting that the deaf individuals relied primarily on whole word
(lexical) representations for reading, rather than an “assembled phonology.” Although
the data from these lexical decision studies seem to converge with the spelling
studies in finding no phonology, there are some cautions to note. One is that it
is impossible to draw conclusions about the presence or absence of phonology
from a failure to find a difference,
which is what the logic of comparing regular and irregular words requires in
this case. A failureysis of the phonological abilities of Cantonese-speaking children
with hearing loss (Dodd & So, 1994). Because the phonological structure of
Cantonese, which includes tones, is quite different from that
of English, finding similarity between hearing and deaf children in phonological
development is especially interesting. Intentional use of phonology.In asking
whether deaf readers use phonology, it is helpful to distinguish between automatic
use and intentional use. In hearing adult readers, the conclusions about
phonology are about an automatic phonology that accompanies reading. It is of interest
to know whether deaf readers can use phonology under some conditions even if
they do not use it routinely. Indeed, evidence from several laboratories
indicates that deaf readers can use phonological information when the task
requires it, as in rhyme judgments (e.g., Campbell & Wright, 1988; Hanson
& Fowler, 1987; Waters & Doehring, 1990). For example, Hanson and
Fowler (1987) presented participants with two pairs of (written) words and
asked them to judge which pair rhymed. The materials were designed such that participants
could not rely on orthographic similarity when making their judgments: All
pairs of words were orthographically similar; half were also phonologically similar
(e.g., SAVE-WAVE), and half were phonologically dissimilar (HAVE-CAVE). While the
deaf participants were less accurate than the hearing participants (64.1% and
99.6%, respectively), they did perform significantly better than chance. Hanson and McGarr(1989) report
converging evidence. One direct window on phonology comes from naming tasks, in
which participants read aloud as quickly as possible a word or nonword. By
definition, performance relies on phonological output. Additionally, the naming
of pseudo words (pronounceable nonwords) requires the assembly of phonology
from letters, because there is no actual word pronunciation to “look up.” Thus,
it is of interest that Leybaert (1993) found that deaf readers could accurately
read pseudo words aloud in a naming task, clearly implicating an ability to
assemble phonology from letters. Also, like the hearing control individuals,
the deaf individuals showed word length, frequency, and lexicality effects (faster
naming for real words than for pseudo words).
The task includes a stage of “verification”
following the activation of the word representation by the letter string. This
verification stage can make it more difficult to observe effects that are at
the word activation (lexical access) stage, including phonological effects. More
generally, Berent and Perfetti (1995) discuss a number of task factors that
influence whether a given reading task is likely to expose phonology. Their most
important conclusion is that, in any reading task, regularity effects are indeed
evidence of phonology, but findings of no regularity effects are not
evidence against phonology
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