Reading and Spelling Abilities of Deaf Adolescents With Cochlear Implants and Hearing Aids
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education
Margaret Harris* and Emmanouela Terlektsi
Oxford Brookes University
Received March 16, 2010.
The gap between deaf children and hearing peers tends to widen with age (Marschark & Harris, 1996) and so difficulties become more apparent as children progress through school. A recent study (Kyle & Harris, 2010) found a mean delay of 1 year in the reading scores of a group of 8-year-old deaf children: This had increased to a 3-year delay at age 11 years. A comparable cohort of 14-year-old deaf children (Harris & Moreno, 2004) showed an average reading delay of over 4 years. ...
In order to understand why literacy is so challenging for many deaf children, it is pertinent to consider the skills that underpin learning to read an alphabetic script, such as English, for hearing children.
Two key components—knowledge of spoken English and phonological awareness—have been found to underpin the development of literacy. Oral language and vocabulary predict reading development (Bowey & Patel, 1988; Dickinson, McCabe, Anastasopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg, & Poe, 2003); and the ability to identify and manipulate phonemes within words—core aspects of phonological awareness—have been shown to be key to early reading success for hearing children (Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004).
The emerging picture of predictors of deaf children's literacy suggests that broadly similar skills are important although there are some notable differences. As with hearing children, the most compelling data come from longitudinal studies that have examined factors predicting reading outcomes over a period of 1 or more years. One such study (Harris & Beech, 1998) found that, between the ages of 5 and 7 years, speech intelligibility, phonological awareness, and language comprehension predicted reading development. In a study of 6-year-old French children, early phonological awareness skills, including rhyme judgment and rhyme generation, predicted the reading progress made over 1 year (Colin, Magnan, Ecalle, & Leybaert, 2007). A recent study (Kyle & Harris, 2010) examined reading progress over a 3-year period, from the age of 7 years. Although most children showed reading delays at the end of the study, those with better vocabulary and speechreading skills at age 7 years exhibited less severe delays. This latter finding was consistent with the results of a comparison between matched groups of good and poor deaf readers at age 8 (Harris & Moreno, 2006), which showed a significant difference in speechreading ability in favor of the better readers.
All these studies, with the exception of Colin et al. (2007), assessed deaf children from a variety of educational settings so these findings are not specific to preferred mode of communication. Indeed, knowledge of spoken English and speechreading skills appear to be as important for children who sign and for those whose education is predominantly oral. ...