Literacy Instruction for Students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing

Most students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) struggle with acquiring literacy skills, some as a direct result of their hearing loss, some because they are receiving insufficient modifications to access the general education curriculum, and some because they have additional learning challenges necessitating significant program modifications. Additionally, instructional practices for DHH students tend to be directed toward two sub-populations of DHH students: those with useable access to sound and those without. Literacy Instruction for Students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing describes current, evidence-based practices in teaching literacy for DHH students and provides practitioners and parents with a process for determining whether a practice is or is not "evidence-based." Easterbrooks and Beals-Alvarez describe the importance of the assessment process in providing on-going progress monitoring to document students' literacy growth as a primary means to direct the course of instruction. They address the five key areas of instruction identified by the National Reading Panel: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. In this concise guidebook, the authors present the role of assessment in the literacy process, an overview of evidence-based practices, and in the absence of such information, those practices supported by causal factors across the National Reading Panel's five areas of literacy. They also review the evidence base related to writing instruction, present case studies that reflect the diversity within the DHH population, and review the challenges yet to be addressed in deaf education.

Susan R. Easterbrooks is Professor of Educational Psychology and Special Education at Georgia State University, and head of its Deaf Education program that trains teachers and doctoral students. She is also a core faculty member of the National Leadership Consortium in Sensory disabilities, and Co-Principal Investigator of the National Research and Development Center for Literacy and Deafness, a $10 million project of the Institute for Education Sciences. She is the author of three books and five chapters in deaf education, and has over 45 articles published in the field. She has worked with student teachers for over 25 years. Jennifer Beal-Avarez is the School Improvement Grant Coordinator at the Georgia School for the Deaf. She worked for six years as an itinerant teacher of the deaf with students in pre-k through high school, four years as an early interventionist with the Georgia Parent Infant Network for Educational Services, and two years as a research teacher with an emergent literacy curriculum developed at Georgia State University. She is a member of the Association of College Educators-Deaf/Hard of Hearing and the Georgia Pathway to Language and Literacy online community of practice.