Students who are deaf often have great difficulty in accessing written English. A "bilingual" approach to education may help deaf students improve their literacy skills. This paper explains work in progress regarding two projects supported by the United States Department of Education, which explore the potential of interactive video technology and sign language for improving reading comprehension and test-taking skills of deaf junior high and senior high school students. These projects feature: student access to one or more signed versions of English to help them understand any portion of the target text; a sign language dictionary of difficult words or phrases; and instruction, questions, and corrective feedback provided in sign language as well as text. Use of the multimedia technology and sign language appear highly motivational to students. A number of factors seem to influence students' capacity to benefit from sign language helps: sign language comprehension skills of students; level of prior language-related reasoning experience; prior knowledge of the topics; knowledge of the operation of the computer system; and beliefs about the usefulness or appropriateness of sign language. (Contains 12 references.) (Author/MAS)