International perspectives about literacy and deaf students is an uncharted intellectual landscape. Much of the literacy research in deaf education is conducted in English-speaking countriesâprimarily the United Statesâbut 90% of deaf children live outside the U.S. and learn various signed and spoken languages, as well as diverse writing systems. Many of these children face significant educational challenges. In order to improve the literacy outcomes of deaf students around the world, it is imperative to study how children are using their local signed and spoken languages along with Deaf culture to learn to read and write. This volume fills a void in the field by providing a global view of recent theoretical and applied research on literacy education for deaf learners. Literacy and Deaf Education: Toward a Global Understanding is organized by region and country, with the first part discussing writing systems that use alphabetic scripts, and the second part focusing on countries that use non-alphabetic scripts. Some examples of the wide spectrum of topics covered include communication methodologies, curriculum, bilingual education, reading interventions, script diversity, and sociocultural development, including Deaf cultural developments. The contributors provide the results from literacy projects in fifteen countries and regions.This volume aims to widen the knowledge base, familiarize others in the field with these initiatives, and improve global understandings and outcomes of literacy teaching and learning in deaf education from birth to high school.Signed chapter summaries are available on the Gallaudet University Press YouTube channel.
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TECLAS: A Reading Comprehension Intervention for Chilean Deaf Adolescents
MarĂa Rosa Lissi, Christian SebastiĂĄn, MartĂn Vergara, CristiĂĄn Iturriaga, Catalina HenrĂquez, and Sergio Hofmann
The difficulties deaf students face in order to develop written language skills are still a challenge for educators and researchers (Benedict, Rivera, & Antia, 2015; Marschark et al., 2009). Studies carried out in Chile have also shown that the reading level of our deaf students is way below that of their hearing peers (Herrera, 2010; Lissi, Raglianti, Grau, Salinas, & Cabrera, 2003). This is quite alarming if we take into account that our hearing students already show a reading level that is below the average of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (Agency for Quality Education, 2014).
It has been reported that deaf studentsâ difficulties with reading are associated with a limited syntactic and lexical command of the language of written textsâSpanish in the case of Chile1âwhich is a second language for signing deaf students; a lack of background knowledge about text content; a lack of knowledge about the structure of written texts; and a limited repertoire of cognitive and metacognitive strategies, among other things (Luckner & Handley, 2008).These difficulties have been reported mostly in US students, but have also been supported by studies carried out in Chile (Lissi et al., 2003; Lissi, SebastiĂĄn, Vergara, Iturriaga, & HenrĂquez, 2015). As a consequence of these restrictions, along with the frustration felt during activities aimed at improving their reading skills, deaf adolescents show little motivation and interest in reading, and they tend to avoid tackling written texts. This has been reported among US deaf students (Parault & Williams, 2010) and Chilean deaf adolescents (Lissi, SebastiĂĄn, Iturriaga, & Vergara, 2017b). One of the least investigated aspects in this area is the use of reading comprehension strategies, which is interesting, since research on hearing children has shown that good readers in the United States have developed higher metacognitive competence and use more reading strategies than their Chilean counterparts, which enables them to adopt a more active, goal-oriented approach to written texts (National Reading Panel, 2000).
Reading comprehension instruction tends to focus more on narrative texts than expository texts (Jitendra, Burgess, & Gajria, 2011). The problem is that understanding expository texts becomes increasingly critical in order to learn in school, especially after 5th grade (Akhondi, Malayeri, & Samad, 2011), and particularly in the case of deaf students from countries like Chile, for whom the learning process inside the classroom tends to be hampered by limitations in teacher-student communication (Lissi et al., 2017a). Taking these facts into consideration, throughout the past six years, our research team has developed several studies on Chilean deaf adolescentsâ reading skills and practices, with a special focus on âreading to learnâ (Chall, 1997). Here, we will discuss the challenges involved in the development of instructional activities to teach deaf adolescents cognitive and metacognitive strategies that promote expository text comprehension. This will be done through the description and analysis of an eight-month intervention, with teachers of the deaf and their students at a large regular high school with an enrollment of more than 50 deaf adolescents. The intervention, in the form of a reading strategies workshop for deaf students, which we named TECLAS2 had five ideas as its pillars (see Figure 1). The evaluation of the TECLAS intervention, through assessment of studentsâ improvement in reading comprehension and strategy use, compared with a similar group without the intervention, showed some discrete but encouraging results, which suggest that this type of approach could contribute to the development of reading comprehension strategies, particularly metacognitive ones (Lissi et al., 2016). The intervention involved constant analysis and reflection about the work being done, which allowed our team to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by deaf education in our country, especially those involved in teaching literacy skills to deaf and hard of hearing adolescents.
In the first part of this chapter, we present some background information about deaf education in Chile, and we delve into the theoretical framework and empirical findings that supported the design of the TECLAS intervention.
In Chile, many deaf youth will be exposed only to Spanish in their homes, but they never fully acquire Spanish. When they become exposed to Chilean Sign Language or Lengua de Señas Chilena (LSCh)âusually not until they get to schoolâthis becomes their first or preferred language because it is fully visually accessible to them, and then they learn Spanish (reading and writing) as a second language.
With regard to higher education, there is not precise information regarding the number of deaf students enrolled (Herrera, 2010). Although opportunities to access higher education and to receive some accommodations have been slowly increasing during the past few years, many higher education institutions still pose many obstacles for deaf students.
Recent Findings on Chilean Adolescents and Reading
In a recent study, our team interviewed 46 deaf adolescents from 7th to 12th grade in order to learn about their experiences, beliefs, preferences, and practices regarding reading (Lissi, SebastiĂĄn, Iturriaga, & Vergara, 2017b). The results show that for many of them, readingâespecially in school contextsâis seen as a difficult, unpleasant task that requires too much effort, and, as a consequence, they try to avoid it as much as they can. Deaf students tend to see reading as a hearing personâs activity, and therefore do not feel very competent at it. They tend to attribute this mainly to their limited vocabulary knowledge, which suggests an understanding of the reading process as restricted to identifying the meaning of each word in the text.
In another study, Lissi et al. (2015) used a âthink-aloudâ procedure, based on the work of Banner & Wang (2010), to explore the reading strategies used among deaf adolescents. The results showed that they make little use of strategies to try to comprehend a text. Even though all students encountered several unknown words in the texts, only a small group reported using specific word identification strategies to approach them. The most competent readers showed a more active attitude, while less competent readers felt frustrated and lost motivation when faced with too many unknown words.
Given the scarcity of research and interventions on comprehension of expository texts with Chilean adolescents, the authors developed the TECLAS project. Below, we present its theoretical background.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUNDOF TECLAS
The project we analyze here took into consideration the findings of previous studies, as well as relevant theoretical frameworks, in order to articulate an intervention that is supported by the five pillars we present (see Figure 1).
Reading Comprehension as a Strategic Process
Among the different factors that have an influence on reading comprehension, the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies stands as an important one (Afflerbach, Pearson, & Paris, 2008). The use of strategies involves a change in the way students face written texts, from a rather passive stance to an active, goal-oriented approach (National Reading Panel, 2000). Among deaf readers, Banner and Wang (2010) found that adults showed a more active approach to reading than students, and they used more and better strategies. Strategies used by competent readers included establishing a purpose for reading, using previous knowledge, using mental imagery, creating questions, summarizing, paraphrasing, predicting, visualizing, and identifying key points. Other studies reveal limited use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies among deaf readers, a tendency to use less complex strategies, such as rereading or relying on images, and a preference for meaning construction strategies over monitoring and improving comprehension strategies (Maina, Kochung, & Oketch, 2014; Morrison et al., 2013; Schirmer, 2003). Developing a more strategic stance to face written material should become a key component of any reading intervention with deaf students.
A Socioconstructivist Approach to Teaching and Learning
The design of an intervention that aims to promote learning for students must first of all establish the concept of learning used by researchers. TECLAS is founded on a socioconstructivist perspective, which integrates ideas from neo-Piagetian and Vygotskian traditions in order to understand the teaching-learning process (SebastiĂĄn & Lissi, 2016). From this perspective, learning is understood as the transformation of prior knowledge structures, as a consequence of facing challenges in the form of cognitive conflicts, in a safe and nonthreatening context. This context should provide the necessary support to solve emergent cognitive conflicts through the transformation of prior structures (Bourgeois, 2009; Rosas & SebastiĂĄn, 2001). This way, and according to Piagetâs statements, when facing a new learning situation or object, students do so with knowledge structures that they have previously constructed throughout their lives, and they will attempt, at first, to act upon or interpret such situations or objects, based on these structures (SebastiĂĄn & Lissi, 2016). If these previous structures allow them to interact with the new learning situation or objectâassimilate, in Piagetian termsâthere is no opportunity for transformation or learning. However, there are moments in which it is not possible to assimilate the object; this produces a disequilibrium, which takes the form of a cognitive conflict when it is ackn...