This Family and Practitioner Brief discusses how deaf children who have not had access to a complete language from birth often encounter unique challenges in developing academic language skills, particularly in the realm of inference-making.

Hearing loss adversely affects language and literacy development and reading difficulties of deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students are well documented by a large body of research. Effective instructional strategies that employ evidence-based strategies to support the reading development of d/Dhh students are required. Therefore, the purpose of…

More U.S. community college students are enrolling without the requisite reading skills to be successful. Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students are following a similar pattern with a little less than half requiring remedial instruction when entering college. College-age readers were the first population that we studied to learn about reading and…

Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

This qualitative research examines the types of metacognitive assessments used by teachers to describe d/Dhh students' metacognitive strategies. In other words, this study investigates three main points: first, teachers' perceptions regarding the use of metacognitive strategies during reading instruction; second, the types of metacognitive…

This study addresses the topic of visual communication and early sign language acquisition in deaf children with a Flemish Sign Language (Vlaamse Gebarentaal or VGT) input. Results are obtained through a checklist focusing on sign-exposed deaf children's visual communication and early sign language acquisition: the adapted VGT Visual Communication…

The reading comprehension levels of students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) are low compared to those of their hearing peers. One possible reason for this low reading levels is related to the students' prior knowledge. This study investigated the potential factors that might affected DHH students' prior knowledge, including their degree of…

In Scandinavia and some other countries, a bilingual-bicultural approach to deaf education was celebrated in national programs from the mid-1980s until the broad popularity of cochlear implantation in middle 2000s created a shift back to an emphasis on spoken language for many deaf children. At the same time, only a few studies evaluated the…