ASL and English bilingual Shared Book Reading: An exploratory intervention for signing deaf children

ABSTRACT

An exploratory study was implemented with bilingual deaf children using a quasi-experimental pre- and posttest design with a 10-week American Sign Language (ASL) and English bilingual Shared Book Reading intervention. Standardized and research-made instruments were used to evaluate ASL and English skills. Intervention effects showed improvements in Receptive ASL skills, Book Reading, and the ability to draw and describe drawings in both languages. Growth in visual phonology was evident in the drawings, and no relationship between auditory phonology and English word identification was found. The results provide implications for early literacy instruction with suggestions for future research.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Sharon Baker, the participants, the superintendents from the two schools, Millicent M. Musyoka, Zanthia Y. Smith, Mary Anne Gentry, ChongMin Lee, and Tracy Knight.

Notes

1. We understand the concept of “people first language” but use “deaf children” because it is the term preferred by the Deaf community (Leigh, Andrews, & Harris, 2018).

2. Deaf individuals use a capital D when describing themselves to reflect that they are a culturaland linguistic minority using a visual language (American Sign Language) regardless of theiraudiological status (Padden, 1980).

3. Signs are conventionally glossed using a notation method, in which capitalized English words (in their root forms) designate an ASL sign (Valli, Lucas, Mulrooney, & Villanueva, 2011).

4. The American Sign Language (ASL): Receptive Skills Test, adapted from the BSL (British Sign Language Receptive Skills (Herman, Holmes, & Woll, 1999) had content validity established by ASL consultants with a reference group of 203 deaf children. Statistical analyses of the standardization data revealed that the test was reliable (showing internal consistency) and valid. There is a high reliability (r = 0.88, SD = 15.15).

5. This nonstandardized, experimenter-made measure was used to assess the sign and finger spelling vocabulary of 50 words found in the 20 storybooks.

6. The Woodcock-Johnson III (WJ III) is normed on hearing children. Reliability statistics were calculated with the WJ III Tests of Cognitive Abilities and WJ III Tests of Reading Comprehension (r = .88). Content validity showed alignment with core curricular areas and domains specified in federal legislation (Shrank, McGrew, & Woodcock, 2001, p. 13). Concurrent validity was reported with the Kauffman Test of Educational Achievement (r = .62) and the Weschler Individual Achievement Test (r = .79).

7. The VL2-Spoken Language Phonology Awareness (VL2-SLPA) Measure showed a strong convergent validity to the Phoneme Detection Test (PDT) (Koo, Crain, LaSasso, & Eden, 2008), another measure developed for deaf individuals, which does not require a verbal response with a strong correlation (r = .54).

8. The Book Reading and Book Retelling tasks were adapted from Mason et al. (1989), pp. 113–114. Two picture books comparable in difficulty level and word/phrase count were used. To score the Book Reading task, a proportional score was computed by dividing the child’s raw score (correctly identified words) by the number of words in the book. In scoring the children’s story retelling, a proportional score was computed by dividing the child’s raw score of idea units recalled by the total number of idea units in the book (Mason et al., 1989, p. 113).