Foundations for Literacy: An Early Literacy Intervention for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Abstract

The present study evaluated the efficacy of a new preschool early literacy intervention created specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children with functional hearing. Teachers implemented Foundations for Literacy with 25 DHH children in 2 schools (intervention group). One school used only spoken language, and the other used sign with and without spoken language. A “business as usual” comparison group included 33 DHH children who were matched on key characteristics with the intervention children but attended schools that did not implement Foundations for Literacy. Children’s hearing losses ranged from moderate to profound. Approximately half of the children had cochlear implants. All children had sufficient speech perception skills to identify referents of spoken words from closed sets of items. Teachers taught small groups of intervention children an hour a day, 4 days a week for the school year. From fall to spring, intervention children made significantly greater gains on tests of phonological awareness, letter–sound knowledge, and expressive vocabulary than did comparison children. In addition, intervention children showed significant increases in standard scores (based on hearing norms) on phonological awareness and vocabulary tests. This quasi-experimental study suggests that the intervention shows promise for improving early literacy skills of DHH children with functional hearing.

Reading and Deafness: State of the Evidence and Implications for Research and Practice

“…These assertions clearly align with the premise of the SVR. In fact, several research teams have explicitly referenced the SVR or similar cognitive models when discussing phonological skills as essential components of both early and conventional reading for deaf learners (e.g., [38][39][40]). The alternative view, in which phonological skills are not considered a necessary element (e.g., [37]), has been critiqued because it has not been contextualized within an extant model of reading, and an alternative hypothesis of development has not been empirically demonstrated [3].…”

“…Even though several scholars in the field have contextualized their intervention research within a conceptual model of development (e.g., [38][39][40]), the findings of the NRP [34] are more frequently referenced as a foundation for this work. This situation may not differ substantially from the field of reading more broadly, as it has been suggested that curricular standards tend to drive instruction more frequently than cognitive models [13].…”

“…Due to the number of studies and the fact that mixed results were obtained in one investigation, the CEC [50] mixed evidence classification was assigned to this practice. Finally, a phonologically focused reading curriculum included in the comprehensive category, Foundations for Literacy, was evaluated by one study [38] and identified as a potentially evidence-based practice as a result of the CEC evidence-based practices analysis [43].…”

Feasibility of a Recasting and Auditory Bombardment Treatment With Young Cochlear Implant Users

“…The reasons for the absence of a coherent treatment literature include the diversity of the population of those with hearing impairment (e.g., Ertmer, Leonard, & Pachuilo, 2002; as well as the diversity of the goals addressed by different treatment methods (White & BrennanJones, 2014). For example, some of the more recent studies have targeted diverse areas such as narratives (Justice, Swanson, & Buehler, 2008), literacy (Lederberg, Miller, Easterbrooks, & Connor, 2014), and language development broadly defined (Ertmer et al, 2002;Hogan, Stokes, White, Tyzkiewicz, & Woolgar, 2008). To our knowledge, there has not been a treatment procedure that specifically targets morphology in the oral domain for children with cochlear implants.…”

Rethinking Emergent Literacy in Children With Hearing Loss

“…Letter sounds are often considered a print awareness measure (Ambrose et al, 2012;Webb et al, 2015), and its loading onto both factors could indicate that children are using the visual information available in print to help them learn sound segments (Easterbrooks et al, 2008;Dillon et al, 2012). Consistent with this hypothesis, in school-age readers who use CIs, those programs that use print materials as part of the phonological awareness trainingsuch as by teaching sound-letter correspondence-show growth on general phonological awareness skills (Lederberg et al, 2014), providing evidence that an approach that builds on children's existing strengths may lead to greater literacy success. We do not claim that auditory access plays no role in phonological sensitivity development for preschoolers who use CIs, rather, we argue that print information can help children resolve their poor spectral resolution to learn speech segments.…”