Literacy acquisition and deaf children: A study of the interaction between ASL and written English

Even though many deaf children have difficulty with reading development, some of them, nevertheless, become literate, many at high levels of proficiency. Usually those proficient in ASL also become proficient in written English despite the typological difference between both languages. Literacy was defined in this study as a cognitive-dependent skill in language regardless of the mode. The question posed by this study was whether literacy competence in ASL predicts literacy competence in written English.; The subjects in the study represented a diverse population who were in grades 6--8 at an ASL/written English bilingual school. Testing materials were developed to compare the students' language and literacy skills in ASL and written English. The students' vocabulary knowledge and comprehension of passages on a literal level were used to measure their language competence; their comprehension of passages on an inferential level was used to measure their literacy skills. Background information such as language spoken at home, age of enrollment, and hearing ability levels was used to run multiple means comparisons to determine the effects of various factors on each measure of language and literacy performance.; ASL passage comprehension and age of enrollment at an ASL-using school accounted for 66% of the English literacy variance for the subjects with deaf parents, (R2 = 0.657, df = 4, F = 5.755, p < 0.005). Multivariate analyses revealed that for those with hearing parents, communicative access to the parents and the age of exposure to ASL accounted for 48% of the variance in ASL passages comprehension scores (R2 = 0.477, df = 9, F = 3.951, p < 0.001). These findings point to the importance of early ASL acquisition and suggest that dialogues in ASL that cognitively engage deaf children help foster initial literacy skill development in ASL that ultimately leads to literacy competence in both languages. This study offers strong empirical evidence that English literacy can be grounded in ASL and that different questions needed to be asked about the language and literacy development of deaf students.