A Study of the Letter, Word and Story Reading Abilities of Forty-Five Young Deaf Residential Children: A Longitudinal Perspective

181 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983.This study investigated the extent to which young, deaf children understand printed letters, words and stories before and during beginning reading instruction and how their knowledge changed during a full school year. A prereading model was proposed which hypothesized that reading acquisition is initiated when deaf children begin to match meaningful manual language with printed words. Prereading instruction based on the proposed model was constructed and administered to deaf children in kindergarten and the first grade.Forty-five deaf children were selected from three state residential schools for this study. All subjects were (1) between the ages of 5 and 8 years old, (2) had a sensorineural hearing loss of 71dB to 115dB (ANSI, 1969) in the better ear across the speech range, (3) lost their hearing before the age of 2, (4) had normal intelligence, (5) had no additional handicap other than deafness, (6) had English-speaking, hearing parents, and (7) were enrolled in a state residential school which used speech, fingerspelling and manual signs. The experimental group (N = 23) received meaning-enhanced prereading training based on the proposed model, while a control group (N = 22) received traditional reading instruction.A domain referenced test with 8 prereading diagnostic-type tasks was given to both groups in September and again in May. A one-way multivariate analysis of covariance was used with the treatment as the independent variable, the 8 posttests as the dependent variables and the 8 pretests as covariates. An overall significant difference favoring the experimental group was found (F(,8,28) = 7.02385, p 0.001).A questionnaire was given where parents (1) described their children's knowledge about letters, words and stories and (2) described how they support their children's interest in reading.Additionally, classroom diary cases were kept for experimental group during the 7 months of prereading training.Tests, parental reports and diary cases provided descriptive, correlational and statistical support for the proposed model which predicts that significant growth in letter, word and story knowledge occurs when children begin to match meaningful language to printed words.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD