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ABSTRACT
This pilot study explored effects of hearing loss on deaf children’s reading comprehension in an online context. Eighteen deaf secondary students, ages 12–14 years (11 with British Sign Language as their dominant language, seven with English as their dominant language) engaged in an online research comprehension task. Six age-matched hearing spoken language bilingual students served as a comparison group. All participants were identified as confident readers by their teachers. Participants were asked to “think aloud” during an online search task to provide insights into their strategies. Additionally, participants completed a battery of assessments related to reading comprehension, vocabulary, non-verbal IQ, and working memory. Overall results showed similar use of strategies across all students. Strategies applied by the most skilled readers involved drawing on prior knowledge sources, e.g. informational websites or search engines, prior knowledge of the topic, and taking the time to read and evaluate website headings before deciding which one to use as source. Participants also made use of working memory skills. Findings highlight the importance of teaching online search and evaluation skills as part of the reading curriculum in schools.
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This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
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Notes on contributors
Wolfgang Mann
Dr. Wolfgang Mann is the chair of the Programme for Education and Rehabilitation of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing at the University of Cologne, Germany. Prior to this position, he carried out research and taught at universities in the UK as well as in the US where he received his PhD in Special Education. Wolfgang's research focuses on language acquisition and language assessment in children with a hearing impairment, bilingual-bimodal deaf education, the development of sign language tests and on dynamic assessment with children that are deaf or hard of hearing children.
Rachel O’Neill
Rachel O'Neill is a senior lecturer in deaf education at the University of Edinburgh where she teaches and organises the postgraduate diploma for teachers of deaf children. Her research covers the areas of online reading, the implications of poverty for deaf children and their families, deaf students' experiences at transition post-school and language policies in the deaf education field. She was co-editor of Deafness & Education International from 2018 to 2022.
Freya Watkins
Freya Watkins is a Psychology PhD student in the writing-up phase at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on the linguistic processing of signed languages, especially by hearing L2 learners of British Sign Language and in diverse viewing conditions. Freya was the main research assistant for the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust-funded Online Reading Research Project about web-based reading strategies in deaf and hearing teenagers. She has also been a research assistant in Robin Thompson's M2L2 Lab, working on sign psycholinguistics studies using behavioural, eyetracking and electromyography methodologies. Within the School of Psychology, Freya has taught on undergraduate and postgraduate modules including Research Methods, Research Practical, Cognitive Psychology, Transferable Skills, Psychobiology and Introduction to PsychoPy. Freya also teaches data visualisation and analysis using R with Git for version control, as well as working as a freelance German to English translator.
Robin L. Thompson
Dr. Robin Thompson is a linguist and cognitive scientist. She is currently an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Birmingham (UK) and director of the Multimodal, Multilingual Language Processing Lab (M2L2Lab). She holds a PhD in cognitive science and linguistics (joint degree) from the University of California, San Diego and has held positions at the Salk Institute, San Diego State University and University College London. Her research investigates the underlying nature of human language (both signed and spoken) and, in particular, how language is related to other aspects of cognition.