1-114 - Language and Literacy Development of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children in the 21st Century: An International Perspective

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Today’s generation of deaf and hard-of-hearing children (DHH) benefit from a number of changes in newborn hearing screening, early intervention, and better hearing technology. This has led to a promise of a revolution in the outcomes for DHH children, with the expectations for development commensurate with hearing peers, but the papers in this symposium question this assumption. The first study in the UK compared cohorts of DHH children ten years apart and found that there were gains in some aspects of language, but not in reading. A second study conducted in Israel found that Arabic DHH children had lower language but similar (low) literacy skills compared to hearing children. DHH children who had teachers of the deaf had higher literacy than those with teachers with general special education training. A third paper examined language and literacy in a large cohort of US DHH children with and without functional hearing. Results show that two distinct models of reading achievement emerge: The first model parallels models of reading for hearing children and the second model is unique to DHH children. A fourth paper examines a new approach to teaching word decoding that acknowledges that DHH children with limited functional hearing may benefit from interventions that do not assume that they learn reading like hearing children. As a whole, these papers underscore that, while there are improvements in DHH children's language and literacy, we need to recognize that there may be alternative pathways to reading and that DHH children still need specialized teaching.

Sub Unit

• Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Chairs

• Amy R Lederberg, Georgia State Univ

• Brenda Schick, Univ of Colorado

Individual Presentations

• Reading Ten Years On: Has Technology Made A Difference To Deaf Children’s Literacy? - Presenting Author: Margaret Harris, Oxford Brookes University; Emmanouela Terlektsi, Oxford Brookes University; Fiona Kyle, University College London; Emma Corder, Oxford Brookes University

• Early Literacy of Children with Hearing Loss in the Arab Sector in Israel - Presenting Author: Dorit Aram, Tel Aviv University; Maha Sammar-Assadi, Tel Aviv University; Tova Most, Tel Aviv University; Ofra Korat, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan; Safiah Hassunha Arafat, Beit Berl College

• Development of Language, Reading, and Phonological Awareness in Deaf and Hard-Of-Hearing Children - Presenting Author: Amy R Lederberg, Georgia State Univ; Brenda Schick, Univ of Colorado; Mi-young L Webb, Georgia State University; Shirin Antia, University of Arizona; Susan R Easterbrooks, Georgia State University; Poorna Kushalnagar, Rochester Institute of Technology; Carol McDonald Connor, Arizona State University; Lee Branum-Martin, Georgia State University

• A Reading Intervention for DHH Students: Phonological Awareness in Fingerspelling - Presenting Author: Brenda Schick, Univ of Colorado; Kathleen Sterwerf-Jackson, Georgia State University; Nancy Bridenbaugh, Univ of Colorado - Boulder; Amy R Lederberg, Georgia State Univ