Children, from birth, acquire literacy within various contexts, including in early childhood educational settings. In the United States, there has been renewed attention from the public, the government and educators to increase the quality of early childhood education. Particular focus has been on settings serving children who are at risk for of…

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) literature, including the reading behaviour of Deaf adults, suggests that Teachers of the deaf (TODs) read different amounts of text during read alouds to DHH prereaders based on the spoken and visual communication modes DHH prereaders use, such as: American Sign Language (ASL), only spoken English (speech),…

Helping young deaf and hard of hearing children explore ASL and English is one of the important jobs with which the preschool teachers who work with those children are tasked. Learning ASL and English, the children will become bilingual, fluent in the two languages they will use throughout their lives. Working with two languages requires planning.…

Cued Speech is a visual mode of communication in which mouth movements of speech combine with "cues" to make the sounds (phonemes) of traditional spoken languages look different. Cueing allows users who are deaf, hard of hearing, or who have language/communication disorders, to access the basic, fundamental properties of spoken languages…

For d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing prereaders who communicate predominately in spoken and/or signed English (DHH-English), Teachers of the d/Deaf (TODs) read books aloud to increase English skills, auditory-verbal comprehension, sequencing skills, verbal reasoning, background knowledge, and sight word recognition. Teachers struggle to select…

On Mackworth Island, not far from Portland, the Mackworth Island Preschool Program at the Maine Educational Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing/Governor Baxter School for the Deaf (MECDHH/GBSD) helps deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing children flourish. At MECDHH/GBSD, instructors immerse students, 3-5 years old, in American Sign Language…

Vocabulary development is an essential linguistic component of later English literacy skills (National Reading Panel 2000). However, very few studies have addressed the promotion of vocabulary development in deaf children who are American Sign Language users (Luckner and Cooke 2010). Therefore, this qualitative collective case study examined the…

Parent-to-parent support is vital for parents of all children, but, of course, it is especially vital for parents who have deaf or hard of hearing children. Without the support of other parents, those with deaf and hard of hearing children can easily feel isolated, confused, and alone. Once they meet each other, however, those same parents feel…

According to the sociocultural perspective of language development, language learning is a by-product of communication that is meaningful. For deaf students, who often have limited access to communication at home, it becomes more essential that their school provides a rich communicative environment. Meaningful interaction is a powerful motivating…

Capitalizing on preschoolers' inherent enthusiasm and capacity for learning, the authors developed and implemented a dual-language program to enable young children to experience diversity and multiculturalism by learning two new languages: Spanish and American Sign Language. Details of the curriculum, findings, and strategies are shared.

Storytime audiences grow ever more diverse, and it's important that the materials used in programs reflect that richness of experience. Multiculturalism need not be an occasional initiative attached to particular holidays. In this book best-selling authors MacMillan and Kirker offer a new paradigm for multicultural programs, one in which diversity…

With the increase in research on multiliteracies comes greater interest in exploring multiple pathways of learning for deaf children. Educational media have been increasingly examined as a tool for facilitating the development of deaf children's language and literacy skills. The authors investigated whether preschool deaf children (N = 31)…

From an ethnographic case study of a state-funded residential school for the Deaf, the authors employed Critical Discourse Analysis to identify competing discourses in the talk of educators. These discourses are embedded in the historical oppression and labeling of deaf people as disabled and the development of Deaf culture as a counter-discourse.…

There is increasing support for using media products as early intervention tools for deaf children. Because deaf children are visual learners, products such as interactive DVDs and videos can be an effective supplement in the teaching of ASL and literacy skills to deaf children. While adult mediation during literacy activities has been shown to…

A pressing concern in the education of deaf children is their lack of academic success as measured by literacy rates. Most deaf children finish high school reading below a fourth-grade level. Educational television programs have successfully fostered preschool hearing children's emergent literacy skills. As for preschool deaf children, however,…