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Teachers' deaf English program is on the grow
A deaf English grammar teaching program that began in Longview Independent School District as a pistachio nut about eight years ago has grown into a panoramic backdrop of trees, houses and even some colorful ghosts.
Landscape Language, as it has been named by two local teachers, will be used by educators in Clear Lake and Temple during the 2007-08 school year to determine its true effectiveness.
Developed by Erin Stokes and Gorgeen Spyhalski to teach nouns and verbs, the Landscape curriculum consists primarily of cut-out illustrations with magnets attached to allow students to manipulate them to proper sentence form.
Spyhalski, a teacher at Doris McQueen Primary School, said deaf education language programs typically use abstract methods, which can be especially difficult for students who cannot hear.
"Other programs used linguistic sentence patterns, letters and abbreviations, which make sense to us," Spyhalski said. "But young children don't generally have a concept of nouns and verbs and we needed the visual."
Stokes, who teaches deaf education at Mozelle Johnston Elementary School added, "We were trying to come up with something concrete that they were familiar with — something that could represent language to them — and the pistachio nut was something we could all understand."
Stokes said she and Spyhalski opted for the pistachio because it was the ideal model for explaining verbs.
"The pistachio has two distinct shells which could represent past and present participles and, of course, the nut is the verb," Stokes said.
From the unshelled pistachio, the teaching pair added trees which represent more verbs, color-coded "object noun" houses, "future, past and present tense" clouds and the "I" and "We" ghosts, among other objects. The success of their program has been remarkable, the two said.
"At first, it was a draft of something that we needed to serve the students at that time," Stokes said. "But we saw a lot of light bulbs going off quickly, so we continued to expand it."
Spyhalski added that deaf students who were taught by Landscape also had a tendency to move into mainstream education more quickly.
"We had not been placing (deaf) students into mainstream classes until junior high school, on average," Spyhalski said. "But I have students going into regular reading classes as early as first grade. We've made progress."
The two said other teachers took notice of their progress during a statewide conference of deaf educators in 2006, which prompted the Landscape experiment in Temple and Clear Lake. Teachers from those districts took training on using the program last week in Longview.
"English is one of those abstract things and I think our kids need a visual system to learn it," said Alison Chappell, who teaches kindergarten through eighth grade in Temple. "That's one reason I think this program will be very successful in our school."
"This is something that was actually developed on deaf children in Longview," said JoAnne Fifield, a Clear Lake second-grade teacher. "We've adapted other things to teach language skills to deaf students, but there really isn't much available and this program looks very promising."
Spyhalski said she, Stokes and Al White, formerly the head of the deaf education program at Texas Woman's University, will monitor progress in the other two school districts.
"The students will have to put down the language that they have internalized and we'll analyze their sentences and send it back to the teachers in those districts," Spyhalski said. "That will tell us whether our program is doing what we think it is doing."
If the results are positive, Spyhalski and Stokes hope to publish their research data in a journal for deaf education professionals.
"The dream for us would be share Landscape Language with every teacher of hearing-impaired children," Spyhalski said. "We don't believe this will be a miracle for every child, but it has helped a lot of students that may have otherwise fallen through the cracks."
A deaf English grammar teaching program that began in Longview Independent School District as a pistachio nut about eight years ago has grown into a panoramic backdrop of trees, houses and even some colorful ghosts.
Landscape Language, as it has been named by two local teachers, will be used by educators in Clear Lake and Temple during the 2007-08 school year to determine its true effectiveness.
Developed by Erin Stokes and Gorgeen Spyhalski to teach nouns and verbs, the Landscape curriculum consists primarily of cut-out illustrations with magnets attached to allow students to manipulate them to proper sentence form.
Spyhalski, a teacher at Doris McQueen Primary School, said deaf education language programs typically use abstract methods, which can be especially difficult for students who cannot hear.
"Other programs used linguistic sentence patterns, letters and abbreviations, which make sense to us," Spyhalski said. "But young children don't generally have a concept of nouns and verbs and we needed the visual."
Stokes, who teaches deaf education at Mozelle Johnston Elementary School added, "We were trying to come up with something concrete that they were familiar with — something that could represent language to them — and the pistachio nut was something we could all understand."
Stokes said she and Spyhalski opted for the pistachio because it was the ideal model for explaining verbs.
"The pistachio has two distinct shells which could represent past and present participles and, of course, the nut is the verb," Stokes said.
From the unshelled pistachio, the teaching pair added trees which represent more verbs, color-coded "object noun" houses, "future, past and present tense" clouds and the "I" and "We" ghosts, among other objects. The success of their program has been remarkable, the two said.
"At first, it was a draft of something that we needed to serve the students at that time," Stokes said. "But we saw a lot of light bulbs going off quickly, so we continued to expand it."
Spyhalski added that deaf students who were taught by Landscape also had a tendency to move into mainstream education more quickly.
"We had not been placing (deaf) students into mainstream classes until junior high school, on average," Spyhalski said. "But I have students going into regular reading classes as early as first grade. We've made progress."
The two said other teachers took notice of their progress during a statewide conference of deaf educators in 2006, which prompted the Landscape experiment in Temple and Clear Lake. Teachers from those districts took training on using the program last week in Longview.
"English is one of those abstract things and I think our kids need a visual system to learn it," said Alison Chappell, who teaches kindergarten through eighth grade in Temple. "That's one reason I think this program will be very successful in our school."
"This is something that was actually developed on deaf children in Longview," said JoAnne Fifield, a Clear Lake second-grade teacher. "We've adapted other things to teach language skills to deaf students, but there really isn't much available and this program looks very promising."
Spyhalski said she, Stokes and Al White, formerly the head of the deaf education program at Texas Woman's University, will monitor progress in the other two school districts.
"The students will have to put down the language that they have internalized and we'll analyze their sentences and send it back to the teachers in those districts," Spyhalski said. "That will tell us whether our program is doing what we think it is doing."
If the results are positive, Spyhalski and Stokes hope to publish their research data in a journal for deaf education professionals.
"The dream for us would be share Landscape Language with every teacher of hearing-impaired children," Spyhalski said. "We don't believe this will be a miracle for every child, but it has helped a lot of students that may have otherwise fallen through the cracks."
