Phonological Awareness in Finger Spelling as an Alternative Pathway to Literacy in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

• In Event: Language and Literacy Descriptions and Interventions From the Center on Literacy and Deafness

Abstract

Objectives
This study describes an intervention program designed to use fingerspelling as an alternative pathway to spoken phonological awareness and provides data on the outcomes of a year-long intervention.
Theoretical Perspective
Research on literacy development in hearing children has provided strong evidence that phonological awareness skills are essential to learning to read. However, a major barrier to literacy for many DHH children is vocabulary and decoding skills. Despite advances in hearing technology and newborn hearing screening, many deaf and hard-of-hearing children have limited access to spoken language in order to develop spoken phonological awareness. Our previous research (Schick, Lederberg, Webb, 2014) shows a strong relationship between fingerspelling skills, word identification of printed English, and reading. That is, improving fingerspelling skills in children with limited hearing may provide a visual means of analyzing word internal structure and may strengthen cognitive representations of the word internal structure of printed words.
Methodology and Data Sources
Phonological Awareness in Fingerspelling is an intervention to develop DHH student’s understanding of sublexical units in fingerspelling to aid in decoding.
The intervention, Phonological Awareness in Fingerspelling parallels instruction in phonological awareness for spoken language, but is modified and adapted for fingerspelling.
The intervention used a word family approach, where the children analyzed words into onset and rime. For example, a 1st grade unit had two word families (fill, hill, pill, will, bell, fell, sell, tell). Children identified onset and rimes using only the fingerspelling at first, with print being introduced after two days of fingerspelling word analysis. Units consisted of six days of lessons, each approximately 25 minutes long.
Two interventions used a Single Case Study Design that was 9 months in duration, with pre- and post- assessments. It targeted DHH children from 5 to 9 years of age, in ASL or Simultaneous Communication programs. Fourteen children in two schools participated in Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade lessons.
Results
Results show that: 1) there was a functional relationship between instruction and acquisition of fingerspelled word families; 2) children increased their phonological awareness of fingerspelling; and 3) children generalized the knowledge to print vocabulary. The intervention was particularly effective for those children who were identified as struggling readers with Woodcock-Johnson Letter-Word ID scores below a standard score of 85 (see figure).
Significance
For deaf and hard-of-hearing children with limited access to sound, fingerspelling may provide a Mental Fingerspelled Phonological Representation that allows a student access to word internal structure of written language, supporting vocabulary development, word identification and reading comprehension. It may provide deaf and hard-of-hearing children with an alternative gateway into decoding English text.

Authors

• Brenda Schick, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Amy R. Lederberg, Georgia State University

• Kathy Sterwerf-Jackson, Center on Literacy and Deafness

• Nancy Bridenbaugh, Center on Literacy and Deafness

• Rachel Boll, Center on Literacy and Deafness