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Some suggestions
Possibilities for the development of a reading programme
for Deaf children bearing in mind the variability in first language performance
in BSL include the following points.
- Reading
development needs some preparatory activities – just as does the hearing
children’s development of readiness to read. This is most likely to be
awareness about print, about story sequences (ie the fact that stories have
beginnings, middles and ends), about relations of words and pictures. These
are all pre-reading activities which Deaf children can engage in. Most
commonly they are embedded in story telling activities in BSL but even where
there is limited access to BSL, the child can still work with books, pictures
and symbolic representations.
- Materials
in the pre-reading stage need to be interactive – that it the parents or
pre-school are able to comment on, interpret the pictures, words or the
format. In this way the child begins to attach meaningful activities to the
presentation of text materials. Again this does not especially need BSL
although it is enhanced by its use.
- Word
picture matching is a realistic achievable task for Deaf children and the
development of sight vocabulary would seem like a realistic target in the
earliest literacy classes.
- The next
step is probably writing, rather than reading. At this time, having
introduced books and communicative experiences, which can express the child’s
meaning, the child can be encourage to name objects by writing words next to
pictures. In effect, the child begins to communicate with the pictures.
- The
extension of this is into experience based approaches, where the events on a
class outing or activity are re-created as a picture with labels. The child
begins to express or annotate the experiences with words.
- At this
time, the use of sign language begins to make this process much simpler –
since the beginnings of the necessary contrastive analysis can be carried out
– word-picture-sign matching would begin to ensure the development of an
encoding system.
- From there,
the next stage is to introduce the language experience approach but with the
lead of writing rather than reading. Events lead to discussions in BSL, which
in turn are recorded as video stories, pictures, with word annotation and
gradually an increasingly with written text constructed by teacher and pupil
together.
- Beyond this
the child begins to construct the written text from the experiences directly
without pictures or support from the teacher. Where words are unknown, the
child may be able to use a magic line technique where unknown words can be
left out, to be filled in by teacher or parent.
- At this
point dialogue journal which are means of communication begin to play a role
where the teacher and discuss with the child content which the child has
written and can gradually shape – although not correct – the structures of
English which are produced.
- Only at
this stage would it be reasonable to begin to introduce a reading scheme.
All of the activities can continue to exist with increasing
complexities and the discussion and contrastive analysis can be extended.
The principles outlined by Swanwick are accurate –
contrastive analysis and meta-linguistic representations are crucial to the
development. We are only in the beginning stages of this study.
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