Educators of the deaf and hard-of-hearing have long viewed this population as being Hearing people without the auditory sense and used instructional approaches, especially in reading, that conformed to or paralleled approaches taken with hearing children. In this article, it is argued that a paradigmatic shift must be undertaken that views deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals to be biologically, and therefore linguistically, different, yet uses visually based strategies for reading analogous or equivalent to those for hearing individuals. If these strategies are actively pursued and promoted by educators of the deaf and hard-of-hearing within the ASL/English bilingual/bicultural philosophy, it is suggested that the reconception of deaf and hard-of-hearing people as active, successful readers will be more easily attainable. These strategies, along with models of the reading process, are explored here to provide implications for instruction and areas of future research. In his essay, "How Do You Dance Without Music?" (reprinted in Jacobs, 1989), the Deaf author Shanny Mow paints a compelling portrait of an "average" deaf person named Sam who relies on reading and writing for a significant portion of his daily routine (communicating with hearing co-workers, reading newspapers and books, etc.), yet encounters serious difficulties in maintaining access to the Hearing world through print, due to problems with vocabulary, idiomatic language, grammatical comprehension, and gaps in background knowledge. ("Hearing" is capitalized here to represent the community of persons with no significant hearing loss and their cultural/behavior norms and attitudes, to parallel the opposite usage of "Deaf." But "deaf" Correspondence should be sent to Donald A.