Literacy instruction in primary level deaf education in China

ABSTRACT

The national policy in deaf education in Mainland China primarily focuses on oral/aural instruction and hearing rehabilitation. The curriculum in primary grades is specifically structured on speech and hearing skills for language development. But there is little evidence that documents what early literacy instruction looks like or how teachers conduct the teaching of reading and writing in classrooms with Chinese deaf children. By analyzing videotapes from the first and second grade classrooms, we describe how reading and writing are taught to deaf children in China. The key findings are that the primary grade literacy instruction (1) shares features of Gradual Release of Responsibility model with a focus on speech and hearing skills; (2) uses multimodal strategies and pedagogical tools such as lip-reading, Pinyin phonetic symbols, Pinyin Finger Spelling, Chinese Sign Language (CSL), and Signed Chinese (SC). Moreover, the curriculum reflects low expectations for deaf students as it lacks the academic content provided to their hearing peers. We conclude with implications for literacy instruction in deaf education, and suggest a future research agenda.

KEYWORDS:

• Literacy instruction
• deaf students
• primary grade
• China
• Chinese
• reading
• writing
• Chinese Sign Language
• Signed Chinese
• Pinyin
• Pinyin Finger Spelling
• deaf space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Qiuying Wang, Ph.D., is a literacy faculty at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK. She takes cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparative perspectives on literacy education, examining the literacy development of children from different language backgrounds and from different language learning environments. She is the Director of the Randall and Carol White Reading and Math Center in which undergraduate and graduate literacy students provide low-cost tutoring to children.

Jean F. Andrews, Ph.D., is professor emerita in the Department of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas. Her research interest include language and literacy of deaf individuals, including literacy issues related to forensics.

Notes

1 In this paper, we use the generic term deaf to designate students with a hearing loss so severe that they are not able to benefit from placement in the general education classrooms.