How do you teach a Deaf student to read?

Question

According to my Teaching Reading class, phonics is very important for teaching students to read. A large part of the class focused on the importance of students understanding that words were a combination of letters, which represented sounds.

As a future special education teacher, it is possible that I will be responsible for teaching students who are Deaf or Hearing Impaired to read. I am just wondering how the process would differ for this population, as they are unable to hear the phonetic link. Clearly they are capable of learning, but how would a teacher best facilitate this skill?

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

Just like the IEP's you will be writing, reading is based on what the individual child needs. You will have kids who have very good visual memory,and some may have enough residual hearing or cochlear implants which allow them to to develop phonetics.
Of course you will have parents with specific preference to oral-deaf or ASL -Deaf..either way, you will need their support!
With profoundly Deaf children I have taught "word families" which are spelled the same way but not pronounced the same way so they could learn visually. It seemed to help a little on standardized tests which always seem to have a component of sound/symbol tasks.
This year I have a profoundly Deaf parent request her son learn the symbol and speechreading, as he had never had any speech teaching. I use some of the cochlear implant booksvideos and lip-reading books.
As for my kids with some hearing I teach basic phonics with pictures for the sound symbol part. I must say I go through4 to 5 consumables per grade level. I like to work best with picture phonics. Say there are three pictures and two need to "match" the vowel. Then I like to say the words myself and have them tell me which two match rather than set them off to do the work themselves. They need to HEAR a clear model.
Don't count on your speech pathologist to know how to deal with either the D/HH child.(there are obviously some smart SLP's on THIS site.. but not always in every school)!!!
When I was in a Deaf school, the best reading I saw came out of the Deaf teachers who transfered back and forth from ASL to English for comprehension. Explaining and reexplaining and creating visual imagry..always seeing if the child is "getting" it.
I have had some mentally challenged D/HH kids and used agumentative communication devices and the Mayer-Johnson symbols where you can type out words and the icon will print right on top. Check out their material as it will be just esencial for all you special ed kids. Bravo for you thinking ahead!!!

Answer 2

Whew. It's kinda hard job, huh? anyway, I guess you should also learn their way of communicating first. As what I've observed, they can only understand the hand/body language(nonverbal communication), which is usually used by the poeple who cannot speak. When you're already teaching them to read, you should have a very long patience. In every letter, use a common word they usually use as an example through nonverbal communication. Through that, They can possibly get the use and the pronounciation of the letter. I hope this can help. Being a teacher of the deaf students are really a complicated job though I'm sure it's really enjoy. Good Luck girl!

Answer 3

highly doubtful. In that case it would not be considered reasonable to hire an ASL interpreter as an accommodation. With proper therapy, the person should be able to retain their ability to speak--or at least re learn it and would need to learn to lip read....and might be able to..but it would still be very difficult to get a job. The only other possibility may be in a school where students who are deaf are integrated in a regular classroom. They have this in my state. There is one school district in each county that specifically has services for the deaf and would already have ASL interpreters in the classrooms.....but it may still be an issue as it will slow down the classes and may be distracting to students with other disabilities in the classroom. I'm assuming you mean this person cannot hear even with a hearing aid Teaching an ASL class is not the same as teaching a typical class frankly, with todays technology, i'm surprised there isn't an IPAD app to translate...it could read the ASL by video and turn voice into ASL through audio.....if you are writing a story---that may be available in the foreseeable future

Answer 4

I think it is great that these things cross your mind as you are studying to become a teacher. If you have Deaf kids mainstreamed in your class, they will most likely spend part of the day with the DHH (deaf/hard of hearing) Teacher who has the training to teach Deaf kids to read.

Just to satisfy your curiosity. Phonics isn't part of learning to read for Deaf kids who use sign language as a first language. (A few deaf kids use cued speech in which case they could use phonics. Cueing is cumbersome and is not very widely used.)

English vocabulary is taught by introducing the written English word, for example 'School,' with the sign for 'school.' They memorize the spelling. Sentence structure and grammar are more challenging to teach because they must memorize the rules of English that we have automatically internalized by hearing it everyday.

If you have Deaf kids in your class, it will be important to ask both the DHH teacher and the interpreter what you can do to make your lessons and activites more accessible. And how you can best support them in their work.

Having Deaf students in your class adds a bi-cultural and bi-lingual dimension that everyone can grow from!

Answer 5

Your question touches on my own research on disability--so the following is based on empirical research.

First, its not only a good question, but an important one--and you are opening a serious can of worms.

The average reading achievement level of deaf children is about 4-5 years--and there is a widesppread belief that this is inevitalble--due to the lack of audio speech as a foundation for learning to read

My own research (specifically, MA thesis) arguesstrongly to the contrary. Here is why. First, looking back to education of the deaf in the 19th century, its clear that deaf childreen learned to read--and with better results than today (compared to the general population of the time)! Second, the key problem is NOT lack of an audio referent. You'll find studies that say the opposite. But the evidence I found is that the difficulties relate to one of two reasons. The first is that deaf children learn American Sign Language (ASL). But ASL is not English--it has a different syntax and vocabulary. When this issue is taken into account, and the deaf child is regarded as a student for whom English is a second language, the results are much better. I'll skip over specific strategies--but you can look up articles in the "American Annals of the Deaf" as well as several other good journals.

The second reason (and the issue my own work is concerned with, though it dealt with it more broadly) is that much of the problem is that deaf children have poor lreading skills because they are expected to. That's not intentional, on the part of teachers--but I found compelling evidence to support this idea. Here's the basic idea:

In sociology, there is a well-known phenomenon called the "Hawthorne effect" in which a person's (or a groups) performance improves when they are made the subject of individualized or specialattention by supervisors, teachers, etc.

I reviewed dozens of studies oby teachers of the deaf who had tried a wide range of strategies to help improve their student's reading skills. The strategies were diverse--some even appeaared to contradict each other. But practially all reported positive results. The only common thread was that these students were the subjects of special attention on the part of teachers--they were treated as individuals and their needs placed at the center of the learning process. Looking at individual studies, the diversity and lack of consistancy in teaching methods is invisible--and the role of this social interaction process is equally so. But viewed as a body of data, the studies showed an extremely high corrrelation between this version of the Hawthorne effect and reading outcomes.

What's going on? That's a complex question (and a topic for sociological historians). But in concrete terms, here's the core problem. Remember the studies that found a few years ago that female students had as much math ability as males, but were discoureged (UNINTENTIONALLY) by teachers? The reason was that teachrs, like everyone else, grows up with the same cultural assumptions as others. Researcher's found that teachers, without even being aware of it, did things such as calling on boys in class and not girls--responding to their own unconscious assumptions and the more assertive classroom behavior boys are socialized into.

Its much the same here. Teachers of the deaf are well-intentioned. But they have a set of assumptions (both cultural and professional) that lead them to expect poor literacy skills among their deaf pupils. and those assumptions become a self-fufilling prophecy.

Fair warning--a) thee's no doubt in my mind about this--this is unpublished as yet--but the evidence is EXTREMELY strong. and b)you will get an arguement from a lot of people about this. Good luck--from the sound of your post, you are the type of person the special education professions need many more of! :)

Answer 6

I've worked with individuals with hearing loss for many years and have taken many courses in literacy and deafness. There is a huge body of research on the subject. Look up anything by Dr. Peter Paul (yes, that is his real name). He is an expert in that area. He is also deaf. He is chair of the deaf education program at Ohio State University. If you are planning on going into special education, you should look know his information anyway.

Answer 7

They learn sight reading rather than phonics. They are taught to associate the written letters with the signs and then the same thing with individual words. Most deaf people are taught spelling and reading at the same time.

Answer 8

i though that to teach deaf students you had to have special certification that included sign language.

that would be a question for your instructors, you may need to get special certification to teach hearing impaired, deaf, vision impaired or blind students.

i know that the small class of hearing impaired/deaf students aat my high school, had special teachers, who did sign language for them in regular classes and the students could read lips. there were 8 students and 2 teachers and a speech specialist

Answer 9

It is not impossible for deaf people to read and speak (real speak with sentence), although the pronunciation still sounds strange.
They learn it by mimicking the form of mouth, lips, tongue etc. of other people (or their teacher if they have special training for that). With the help of a mirror and somebody (who is not deaf of course), or with a special voice recognition machine, they then try to make a right pronunciation of different vowels and consonants, then spelling, and finally reading words and sentences, and memorize the right formation of the articulation organ (mouth, lips, tongue, teeth, throat) for each.
Now you can imagine how it works and how difficult and time consuming the process is.
Good luck!

Answer 10

It's possible to pay a lot of time and money trying to find methods to train your kids how to read and boost their examining skills. Is difficult to instruct a small child how to read, and actually alluring them to learn is a challenge in itself. However it does not have to be that way when you got the aid of this program https://tr.im/MOdQb , Children Learning Reading program.
With Children Learning Reading you can show your youngster how to split up seems and separate words into phonemes, a vital point as soon as your child is simply learning how to spell.
The examining process from Children Learning Reading program makes it easy for kids to learn easily and precisely, from easy phrases to phrases until they understand to learn stories.