If you search for general reading levels among the Deaf student population, invariably, you will come across this misleading statistic; Deaf students read at a 4th Grade level. Naturally, this offends my sensibilities.
The Origins
This statistic came from “an article by Carol Bloomquist Traxler (2000) where she reported the norming of the SAT 9 Reading Comprehension subtest.” She reported the median value of 3.9 grade level of Reading Comprehension for the Deaf/HH cohort.
Marc Marschark makes an excellent point about why the median value is misleading. He makes several points about misunderstood research and the importance of deaf kids needing cognitive tools to understand the printed word and/or signs. Hands and Voices made an article about this.
Two Possible Explanations
Explanation One: Deaf students learning to read have orthography issues, because sign language has no written form. When Deaf students read English words, they see an orthographic representation. According to Tom Allen, a Gallaudet professor, this activates “their sign representation of those words.”
Here’s another way of thinking about this. Obviously, you’re reading this in English. If you were to study Spanish, German, or French, you may encounter some difficulty, because the languages uses essentially the same alphabet. (Ok, those umlauts will throw you for a loop!) However, if you were to undertake studies of the Kanji (Japanese) language, the order of difficulty rises significantly.
However, this theory does not address reading difficulties encountered by deaf students who do NOT sign. If they can produce sounds, they should be able to associate sounds with their orthographic representations. Which brings me to phonics.
Explanation Two: Deaf students may not possess phonics skills needed for Reading. This impairs Reading Comprehension significantly. The students need to decode text as they read, form meanings and connections, and comprehend the whole text. Reading should be a seamless endeavor, and fluency will suffer if phonics are impaired or lacking.
Simply put, these Deaf students may rely on sight word recognition instead of phonics in decoding text. This is an inefficient approach to Reading. The human brain can only remember so many sight words in any given year. Phonics gives the reader tools to decode patterns inherent in text. The human brain loves patterns and will leverage patterns in recognizing and remembering words in text passages.
It’s all about Reading itself
In a nutshell, students who read a lot will do better than students who do not read that much. Students are encouraged to read at least 20 minutes a day. Look at this infographic. By reading at least 20 minutes a day, students acquire a vocabulary of around 1.8 million words by the end of 6th grade!
However, if a young Deaf student relies primarily on sight word recognition for Reading, difficulties abound. Here’s an example; My Favorite Place to Go – a 4th Grade PDF text passage. Looks fairly simple. But, to an emerging Deaf reader who relies on sight word recognition, the same text might look like this. (Only Fry sight words are readable.) To a maturing Deaf reader, the same text might look like this. (This assumes a working sight word vocabulary.)
You can see how Deaf readers who rely on sight word recognition are discouraged from Reading. There’s too many blank spaces, and Reading becomes a chore, something that is to be avoided. These readers tend to read approximately one minute a day, and acquire around 8,000 words by the end of 6th Grade.
Conclusion
Regardless of oral/sign language mode, Deaf students need to be encouraged to read on a daily basis. They need supervised reading, so that a parent, adult, or teacher can guide the student through a Reading passage. This is a complex topic, so I’ll address this in another posting. The bottom line? Deaf students can read, and are able to read beyond 4th Grade level! They just need to read on a daily basis and need to be encouraged to read.
Featured Image Credit – My Learning Network, Ideas For Better Learning.