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.

A considerable amount of learning, especially in the early years, is incidental learning. What is incidental learning? It is learning that occurs simply through exposure to the environment--what people hear, see, and experience. It takes place in the natural course of events, without intentionally directed instruction about how or what to learn.…

The article suggests that English literacy can be acquired by deaf children through developmental reading and writing activities that refelct principles of first language acquisition as students relate these activities to experiences which they have already linguistically represented. (Author/CB)