Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

Language Learning Through Reading: The Case of the Deaf1 Student

Martina L. Carlson

Specific Aims: The goal of this proposal is to highlight the difference between hearing readers and deaf readers and show that this difference warrants a shift in our research concerning the deaf reader. To date, research on reading and deafness has followed the trend of reading research as it relates to the hearing individual, namely phonologic and phonemic awareness. This paper views the hearing reader as a language decoder and the deaf reader as a language learner; because of this fact, it follows that we should focus our research attention on language learning in so far as it concerns the deaf reader.

Introduction: This paper is divided into three sections: language acquisition, learning to read, and the research surrounding the issue of learning to read. I highlight the fact that we have missed a critical area of research and that we need to apply what we know of language acquisition to the reading instruction of deaf children. I highlight the consequences of the gap in this research and propose that we must extend our research to this area so that deaf children can have the opportunity to learn English2 through print in a way that parallels the manner in which hearing children acquire English through audition.

Language Acquisition:

Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

Developmental Stages Children pass through stages when acquiring language. By 8 to 10 months, many infants are saying their first words. These are familiar words such as daddy, cookie, and book. Development progresses and the infants vocabulary grows, adding additional familiar words such as juice, shoe, baby, and ouch. In the earliest stages of receptive language development (6-12 months), the child recognizes names of familiar people and objects. Contrastive meanings such as hot and cold come at around 24-36 months (Easterbrooks & Baker, 2002). In the development of English, children first produce one and two word utterances. This is followed by non-inflected three and four word sentences. After this, simple sentence forms can be seen, and lastly compound sentence forms emerge (Gleason, 1989). Comprehension of single words and word categories By 16 months of age, 52% of the words that the child comprehends are nouns, 19% are verbs, 6% are adjectives, and 3% are people. The 12-13 month old infant can comprehend words such as look, go, door, baby, and balloon. By 14-15 months, he or she understands words such as puppy, apple, water, flower, and tree. The infant who is 16 months or older understands words such as big, blue, drive, girl, he, where, and box. Understanding of words such as find, have, and, her, and black come even later3 (Fenson et al., 1994). Morpheme Acquisition Brown established that there is a consistent order for the acquisition of English morphemes. Dulay and Burt applied Browns work on child language acquisition to second language development and found much similarity between L1 and L2 learning (Dulay & Burt, 1974 in Gass & Selinker, 2001). In this order, we see that the present progressive is the first morphological process acquired, followed by the prepositions in and on, and then by the plural. Articles are eighth in the order and regular past tense is ninth. Tenth and eleventh are the third person present regular and irregular tenses4 (Brown, 1973 as cited in Gleason, 1989 and in Gass & Selinker, 2001).

Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

Stages of Question formation The earliest questions to emerge are single words or single word units such as What? and What is your name? After this, come questions in canonical word order that bear the intonation of a question, for example, You have a cat? Next come questions such as, Where the cats are? After this are questions such as, Where is the cat? These are followed by questions such as What do you have? Questions with can inversion such as Can you see what it is? are the last to emerge (Gass & Selinker, 2001). The Nominal System Easterbrooks and Baker (2001) propose hierarchies for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. As the child acquires noun phrases, structures such as early determiners (the girl) and cardinal number (two girls) are the first to emerge, showing up in Phase 1. Phase 2 includes demonstrative determiners and third person pronouns (that dog, he sees). Possessive pronouns and persons name in direct address are seen in Phase 3 (her doll; Sarah, sit down).5 The Verb System With respect to verbs, the earliest structures that emerge are basic transitive and intransitive verbs, concrete uses of have, and the modal can to represent a skill; these are seen in Phase 1. Phase 2 includes the progressive and simple past and future tenses. Sense verbs and idiomatic verbs are in Phase 3, and uses of complex modals are in Phase 45 (Easterbrooks & Baker, 2001).

Learning to Read: The Hearing Reader- A Language Decoder For the typical hearing child, English is acquired through the auditory channel. This is the case for both the first and second language learner. The hearing child learns to speak English and then draws on this knowledge of spoken English when he or she learns to

Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

read. For hearing children, it is widely accepted that phonological awareness plays an important role in the development of reading and that phonemic awareness is one of the best predictors of learning to read (Pang & Kamil, 2004). Readers make connections between the visual form of a word and its sound and meaning stored in memory (Kaplan & Walpole, 2005). Hearing children usually learn to read by forming sound-symbol associations and this is the research that student text books and materials for learning to read draw from. Reading and writing build on the knowledge base and grammatical base of a spoken language (Paul & Quigley, 1994). When a hearing child decodes a sentence such as Sam is in the box, he or she has likely already heard these individual words and this particular sentence structure numerous times. Current materials for the teaching of reading assume that kids have had this prior exposure to the English language, and in the case of the hearing reader, this is assumption is true. The Deaf Reader- A Language Learner For the typical deaf person, English is a second language (Fant, 1972, as cited in Erikson, 1992). The general strategy for bilingual education is for the child to learn to speak the second language before learning to read it (Evans & Seifert, 2000). However, when deaf children begin to learn to read English print, it is at this time that they have their first exposure to English words and to the English language. Unlike the hearing child, when a deaf child reads a sentence such as Sam is in the box in a primary text book, this child has never before heard the words Sam, is, in, the, or box. What a deaf child is doing when he attempts to read for the first time, is an attempt to learn specific English words and structures. For this reason, it is necessary for us to look at and draw upon the research on language acquisition outlined in the section above. Dickinson (1987, as cited in Gleason, 1989, p. 227) says, The spontaneous manner in which children construct knowledge about written language is akin to the way children acquire language, leading many to postulate that the acquisition of both is quite similar. This paper proposes that deaf children should be given the opportunity to acquire written language in the manner that hearing children acquire spoken language. We must begin to research the reading achievement of deaf students who are being systematically taught to read using a

Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

curriculum that presents English in an order that parallels the way in which a hearing child first learns to speak English.

Research on Reading: What Current Research Tells Us All methods which use a phonics base to teach reading assume that kids have heard and have spoken the English language. For the deaf student, the oral language is simply not there to map decoded words onto. Kyle & Harris (2006) say that oral language is an important skill for reading and spelling. Gleason (1989) says that reading extends childrens spoken language. These statements are well-accepted as fact by the researcher, the educator, and the lay person alike, and so research on reading has been concerned with the decoding and comprehension of the written language of English (Paul & Quigley, 1994, p. 147). While there is evidence that for the deaf, written symbols map directly to mental concepts without being mediated by speech (Evans & Seifert, 2000), the role of phonological awareness has been central in research with deaf children. Studies are inconclusive to this end, with some studies showing that phonological awareness predicts reading achievement in deaf children and other studies showing that phonological awareness develops in deaf children as a consequence to learning to read, not as a prerequisite (Kyle & Harris, 2006). The Major Research Problem In light of the statements above, one can see why a large portion of the research on reading and deaf children has centered around the issue of phonemic awareness. However, our failure to see deaf as different than hearing has caused numerous problems. The average deaf child emerges from high school barely able to read above a third-grade level (Brownlee, 1989, as cited in Erickson, 1992, p. 8). Lichtenstein (1998, as cited in Cannon, 2002) reviews that statistics show the average reading level of the deaf adult to be between the third and sixth grade level, with the average cited statistic being a fourth grade level. Despite the huge body of research we have accumulated over the years, this

Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

statistic has remained constant decade after decade (Cannon, 2002 and Kyle & Harris, 2006). The overwhelming majority of 18- to 19-year-old deaf students do not read above a fourth-grade level and this plateau has been in existence since the beginning of the formal testing movement (Quigley & Paul, 1986 as cited in Paul & Quigley, 1994, p. 155). By failing to recognize that deaf students are learning English through reading and that they are doing this without an oral English base, we are failing generation after generation of students. Schools use instructional strategies and curriculum materials informed by the results of experimental studies of reading instruction (Kaplan & Walpole, 2005). Teachers depend on researchers, and teachers of the deaf lack materials to properly instruct their students because we have neglected this crucial research area. Flawed Materials From Flawed Research As research to date has stressed the role of phonemic awareness for learning to read, educational policy and materials have followed suit without regard to the deaf reader (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000). The deaf child, who has had no exposure to oral language, is provided the same curriculum as the hearing child, who has had five or more years of exposure to oral language. In the very beginning of their formal reading instruction, students are taught to read sentences such as Pam had a hat. Pam ran up. Pam ran down. and What is in it? They walk and walk.6 (Beck, et al., 2003). The hearing child progresses through these early stories, decoding words and connecting the decoded words to the spoken language he or she uses daily. The deaf child, on the other hand, begins to learn English through these stories. Analysis of the words and sentences found in the very earliest of first grade reading textbooks shows a sequence highly inappropriate for one who is just beginning to acquire English. The sample sentences above are taken from book 1.1 of Harcourt Trophies. This book is from a research based reading program, published by a major publisher, and used by a large number of schools across the country. Given that the majority of what young children comprehend are concrete nouns, we must question the above material for the early English language learner; the only word that fits this paradigm in the sample sentences above is the word hat. In fact, as we saw in the section on language acquisition above, none of the words in these sentences are the highly familiar words first learned by

Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

children. The third person they is not an early acquired nominal. Neither are the lexical item and and the grammatical structure walk and walk early-occurring. The use of the past tense ran is fifth on Browns acquisition order of morphemes, and articles such as a are eighth. These are not early-occurring structures, nor is the question in the sample sentence above. Future Motivated Research Taking the view of the deaf reader as a language learner motivates a shift in our research focus. Whether or not a deaf reader does or does not use phonics while reading is a secondary issue. We must apply what we know from language acquisition research to our research on reading and deaf children. What we need to examine when it comes to reading and deaf children is not whether or not they can use phonics to break the code. We must look at how they can proficiently acquire English through learning to read. In looking at how normally hearing children learn to read and making this the focal point in our research on reading and deafness, we have failed to address the main issue. Research has thus far focused on whether or not deaf kids learn to read in the same way as hearing kids. To this end, we have missed the big picture, which is that, in the case of the deaf student, we are not just examining the issue of learning to read, but also the issue of learning English. This is, after all, what the deaf child attempts to do when learning to read. Unlike the normally hearing child who is attaching the words on the page to a stored lexicon he has developed through his spoken English proficiency, the deaf child takes the word on the page and adds it for the first time to his developing lexicon. There are serious flaws in the approaches to education of deaf children in America (Cannon, 2002). It is simply not enough to apply mainstream theories of language and literacy to deaf students (Paul & Quigley, 1994). In order to eliminate for good the statistic that deaf people generally reach just a fourth grade reading level, we must focus our reading instruction on the teaching of English. In order to do this, we must develop written materials that follow a sequence of how a child initially learns the English language. We must research this and do our part so that publishers can produce materials, so that teachers can be better equipped to teach this population, so that deaf students can become deaf adults with age-appropriate reading skills.

Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

Notes:
1

Throughout this paper, I use the term deaf to describe the student who cannot hear well enough to develop oral language incidentally and who has not yet developed oral language upon entry to the primary grades; often, this student depends primarily on sign language to communicate. 2 This paper focuses on the development of oral and written English and the education of the deaf in the United States, however generalizations can be made to other spoken and written languages. 3 A sampling of early words and comprehension age can be found in Appendix 1. 4 See Appendix 2 for a list of Browns order of acquisition morphemes. 5 Elaboration of the hierarchy of the nominal system and the verb system can be found in Appendix 3. 6 The text of the first three stories in book 1.1 of Harcourt Trophies is included in Appendix 4.

Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

Appendix 1: A sampling of words comprehended by infants at greater than 50% (Fenson et al., 1994). 12-13 mo bite, eat, go, look, cat, tummy, hot, cracker, door, baby, up, keys, ouch, balloon, eye 14-15 mo break, close, love, sleep, duck, fish, puppy, apple, water, window, flower, tree, doll, airplane 16+ mo clean, drive, feed, help, jump, run, bug, chicken, frog, boots, big, blue, happy, red, sick, cake, oven, sink, rain, sun, girl, man, park, there, under, he, it, that, all, not, where, when, box, plant, bus, day later development buy, find, have, hold, like, pick, sit, stand, work, ant, hen, and, but, black, brown, long, mad, stuck, yellow, cake, corn, soup, bench, shopping, snack, am, are, can, do, is, will, do, does, flag, stick, farm, at, by, for, of, to, with, her, him, she, they, a, a lot, too, the, mop, game, story, boat, after, before, time

Appendix 2: Order of acquisition morphemes (Brown, 1973). 1 present progressive 2,3 prepositions in, on 4 plural 5 irregular past tense 6 possessive 7 copula, uncontractible 8 articles 9 regular past tense 10 third person present tense, regular 11 third person present tense, irregular 12 auxiliary, uncontractible 13 copula, contractible 14 auxiliary, contractible

Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

Appendix 3:

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

The Hierarchy of the nominal system. A sampling from Easterbrooks and Baker (2002). Phase 1 includes early determiners, cardinal numbers, personal pronouns about self and conversational partner Phase 2 includes demonstrative determiners, third person pronouns, it referring to concrete objects, infinitive NP as direct object Phase 3 includes possessive pronouns, multiple pronouns in one sentence, persons name in direct address Phase 4 includes later pre-articles and partitives, advanced articles, it referring to abstract concepts Phase 5 includes gerunds, reflexive pronouns Phase 6 includes noun clause complement with wh form, possessive + ing The Hierarchy of the verb system. A sampling from Easterbrooks and Baker (2002). Phase 1 includes basic transitive and intransitive verbs, concrete uses of have, predicate use of be verbs followed by an adjective, noun, or prepositional phrase, the modal can to represent a skill Phase 2 includes simple past and future tenses, past and present progressive Phase 3 includes abstract have, sense verbs, present progressive meaning future, idiomatic verbs Phase 4 includes double verb sentences, there transformations, uses of complex modals Phase 5 includes perfect tense

Appendix 4: Stories 1, 2, and 3 from book 1.1 of Harcourt Trophies: Guess Who The Hat Pam had a hat. Pam ran up. Pam ran down. Dan ran up. Dan ran down. Dan got the hat. Go, Dan! Go, Pam! Sam and the Bag Max ran in the bag. Hap ran in the bag. Sam ran up the bag. Sam ran down the bag. Can Sam go in? Yes, Sam can go in! Oh, Sam! Ants Look at the big hill. What is in it? Ants! Ants make big homes. They walk and walk. They dig and dig. They lift and lift. Ants go in the hill.

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Marty Carlson November 16, 2006

References:

Ling 566, Fall 2006 Language Learning Through Reading

Ann, J. (2001). Bilingualism and language contact. In C. Lucas (Ed.), The Sociolinguistics of Sign Languages, (33-60). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beck, I. L., Farr, R. C., Strickland, D. S., Ada, A.F., Brechtel, M., & McKeown, M., et al. (2003). Harcourt trophies: Guess Who. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. Cannon, B. J. (2002). Effective facilitation of written English acquisition for deaf and hard of hearing students: A model. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2002). Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement & National Institute for Literacy. (2003). Put reading first: The research building blocks for teaching children to read: Kindergarten through grade 3 [Publication]. (2nd ed.). Chapman, M., Grob, E., and Haas, M. (1989). The ages and learning stages of children and their implications for foreign language learning. Languages in Elementary Schools, International Education Series, 27-42. Easterbrooks, S. R. & Baker, S. (2002). Language learning in children who are deaf and hard of hearing: Multiple pathways. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Erickson, M. (1992). Hear together eyes; write together heart: American Sign Language in the (verbocentric) composition classroom. The Rams Horn, 6, 8-14. Evans, C. J. & Seifert, K. L. (2000) Fostering the development of ASL/ESL bilinguals. TESL Canada Journal, 18(1), 1-16. Fenson, L., Dale P. S., Reznick J. S. Bates, E., Thal, D.J., & Pethick, S. J. (1994). Variability in early communicative development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59(5), 189. Gass, S. M. & Selinker, L. (2001). Second language acquisition: An introductory course. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Gathercole, S. E. & Baddeley, A. D. (1993). Phonological processing and reading development. In S. E. Gathercole & A. B. Baddeley, Working Memory and Language, (pp. 131-175). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gleason, J. B. (Ed.). (1989). The development of language. Columbus: Merrill Publishing Company. Kaplan, D. & Walpole, S. (2005). A stage-sequential model of reading transitions: Evidence from the early childhood longitudinal study. Journal of Educational Psychology 97(4), 551-563. Kyle, F. E. & Harris, M. (2006). Concurrent correlates and predictors of reading and spelling achievement in deaf and hearing school children. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 11(3), 273-288. Murre, J. M. J. (2005). Models of monolingual and bilingual language acquisition. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches, (pp. 154-177). New York: Oxford University Press. Pang, E. S. & Kamil, M. L. (2004). Second-language issues in early literacy instruction. Stanford University Publication Series No. 1., 68-87. Paul, P. V. & Quigley, S. P. (1994). Language and deafness. San Diego: Singular Publishing Group, Inc. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, &National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction: Reports of the subgroups (NIH Pub. No. 00-4754). Reprinted as a public service by The Partnership for Reading, a collaborative effort administered by the National Institute for Literacy.

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