This study investigates the communication practices of four teachers in 3rd to 6th grade classrooms with 9 deaf students with limited language proficiency and in stages of emergent writing development. Analyzing language modalities, utterance types, and class interactivity, we found that teachers using American sign language used student-centered…

The discussion on the role of American Sign Language (ASL) in deaf students' reading development has been long and contentious. The students' limited knowledge of English has been commonly perceived as a culprit in making reading difficult. However, a more nuanced explanation of reading performance and its relationship with competence in ASL's…

Co-author and teacher Bill Wainscott found that his students lack simple state geography concepts. They have little sense of the historical, economic, and cultural influences that shape their state, and they are missing background knowledge that is needed to engage in grade-level curriculum concepts. This article describes the development of an…

Very little is known about how unidentified dual sensory loss (DSL) may affect education and academic outcomes for students with extensive support needs (ESN). We used data from a teacher survey on over 100,000 students with ESN who take U.S. statewide alternate assessments to identify the number of students with known and suspected DSL and the…

The purpose of the empirical study, "The English-Language and Reading Achievement of a Cohort of Deaf Students Speaking and Signing Standard English: A Preliminary Study" (Nielsen et al., 2016), was to investigate the English-language abilities and reading achievement of a sample of students who were deaf and hard of hearing (D/HH) and…

Although there is evidence that academic registers of English are important for hearing monolingual and multilingual learners as they develop through adolescence, there has been less research in this area with deaf and hard of hearing students. The current study sought to determine whether students who were exposed to American Sign Language (ASL)…

Dialogic reading is an instructional strategy that has shown promise for supporting the reading development of children both with and without disabilities. Specifically, there may be positive effects of vocabulary knowledge, morphological knowledge, participation during reading, and emergent literacy skills. However, the knowledge base on the…

Purpose: Diagnoses, assessments, and treatments, as well as social and language interventions, can be effective in identifying and interpreting specific linguistic features that present special challenges to the language abilities of individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). This article reports on a study analyzing complex sentences and…

This study examined the reading comprehension profiles, and the related linguistic and cognitive skills, of 146 Chinese students in Grades 3-9 who are deaf or hard of hearing (d/Dhh). Employing a rigorous regression approach, the current study identified 19 unexpected poor comprehenders, 24 expected average comprehenders, and 16 unexpected good…

This Brief Report addresses the fundamental role that sign language plays in the mathematics classroom of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students. Selected findings are gathered from an ongoing study of signs and gestures used by DHH students and their teachers when encountering and communicating mathematical ideas at a German special-needs school…

In the study reported on here we investigated the effects of sign language barriers among Deaf learners in special schools for the Deaf and Blind in the Motheo District in the Free State province of South Africa. Semi-structured focus group interviews were held with 7 teachers (2 males and 5 females) and 10 Grade 8 learners (6 males and 4 females)…

Glass Vision 3D was a grant-funded project focused on developing and researching a Google Glass app that would allowed young Deaf children to look at the QR code of an object in the classroom and see an augmented reality projection that displays an American Sign Language (ASL) related video. Twenty five objects and videos were prepared and tested…

The nature of this research study examines the relationship between text-talking and writing skills used by American Sign Language (ASL) and English speakers. When given ample opportunity to text-talk in academic settings, it is likely that students will improve their expressive communication and writing skills. The main research question asks:…

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of using visual materials in teaching vocabulary to deaf students of EFL. For this purpose, 80 deaf students from a state special education vocational high school in Turkey contributed to this study. All students had first English classes in their lives and they are at the starter level of English,…

Interactive Writing (IW) is a powerful support for language and literacy development; however, its emphasis on using oral language to construct written language can present challenges for deaf/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students due to their unique and diverse language experiences. Teachers (n = 14) using Strategic and Interactive Writing…