Classroom Discourse: What Is Conveyed Through Educational Interpretation.

When a deaf or hard-of-hearing child enters a classroom with an interpreter, the goal, and sometimes the assumption, is that they will be granted full access to the classroom experience. This study focuses on the clarity and completeness with which critical elements of classroom discourse are conveyed through the interpretations of 40 educational interpreters. Elements studied include conveyance of main ideas, directions for assignments, relevance strategies, orienting commentary, participation solicitation, mental state reference, and semantic organization. The interpretations clearly and completely conveyed approximately one-third to two-thirds of the information (M = 48.6%) related to these elements of classroom discourse. Frequent omissions and alterations rendered large parts of the message markedly different. Results suggest a need to improve training of educational interpreters, increase communication between teachers and interpreters, provide students supplementary services, and heighten awareness that the interpretation process is fallible in ways that can impact access to classroom discourse.

The socialization of modality capital in sign language ecologies: A classroom example.

Gaze behavior is an important component of children's language, cognitive, and sociocultural development. This is especially true for young deaf children acquiring a signed language-if they are not looking at the language model, they are not getting linguistic input. Deaf caregivers engage their deaf infants and toddlers using visual and tactile strategies to draw in, support, and promote their child's visual attention; we argue that these caregiver actions create a developmental niche that establishes the visual modality capital their child needs for successful sign language learning. But most deaf children do not have deaf signing parents (reportedly over 90%) and they will need to rely on adult signing teachers if they are to acquire a signed language at an early age. This study examines classroom interactions between a Deaf teacher, her teacher's aide, and six deaf preschoolers to document the teachers' "everyday practices" as they socialize the gaze behavior of these children. Utilizing a detailed behavioral and linguistic analysis of two video-recorded book-sharing contexts, we present data summarizing the teacher's attention-getting actions directed toward the children and the discourse-embedded cues that signal the teacher's expectations for student participation in the signed conversation. We observed that the teacher's behaviors differed according to the parent status of the deaf preschooler (Deaf parents vs. hearing parents) suggesting that Deaf children of Deaf parents arrive to the preschool classroom with well-developed self-regulation of their attention or gaze. The teachers also used more physical and explicit cueing with the deaf children of hearing parents-possibly to promote their ability to leverage the visual modality for sign language acquisition. We situate these socialization patterns within a framework that integrates notions of intuitive or indigenous practices, developmental niche, and modality capital. Implications for early childhood deaf education are also discussed.

Language and Reading Comprehension Abilities of Elementary School-Aged Deaf Children.

Bilingual education programs for deaf children have long asserted that American Sign Language (ASL) is a better language of instruction English-like signing because ASL is a natural language. However, English-like signing may be a useful bridge to reading English. In the present study, we tested 32 deaf children between third and sixth grade to assess their capacity to use ASL or English-like signing in nine different languages and reading tasks. Our results found that there was no significant difference in the deaf children's ability to comprehend narratives in ASL compared to when they are told in English-like signing. Additionally, language abilities in ASL and English-like signing were strongly related to each other and to reading. Reading was also strongly related to fingerspelling. Our results suggest that there may be a role in literacy instruction for English-like signing as a supplement to ASL in deaf bilingual schools.

Teachers' perceptions of promoting sign language phonological awareness in an ASL/English bilingual program.

The National Reading Panel emphasizes that spoken language phonological awareness (PA) developed at home and school can lead to improvements in reading performance in young children. However, research indicates that many deaf children are good readers even though they have limited spoken language PA. Is it possible that some deaf students benefit from teachers who promote sign language PA instead? The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine teachers' beliefs and instructional practices related to sign language PA. A thematic analysis is conducted on 10 participant interviews at an ASL/English bilingual school for the deaf to understand their views and instructional practices. The findings reveal that the participants had strong beliefs in developing students' structural knowledge of signs and used a variety of instructional strategies to build students' knowledge of sign structures in order to promote their language and literacy skills.