Reading Practices with Deaf Learners

Book excerpt: This book was written specifically for professors and college students in teacher training programs for deaf education and for classroom teachers working with deaf and hard-of-hearing learners. It is one of the very few books on the market that focuses entirely on the hearing-impaired. It consists of three sections, each one providing in-depth information on topics critical to the teaching of reading to this specific population. * Section one: "Foundations" - contains chapters dealing with theory and research in such topics as: cognition, reading, language, literary development, vocabulary and comprehension. One chapter on ASL, English, and Reading looks at the research in the area of second-language learners and discusses its application to deaf and hard-of-hearing students. * Section two: "Instructional Management" - deals with instructional management and describes instructional systems and designs. These chapters look at current trends in education and how these trends apply to the education of students who are deaf and hard of hearing. * Section three: "Applications" - focuses on specific instructional models in reading, writing, and spelling, detailing strategies that have been successfully used with deaf and hard-of-hearing learners. The last chapter in this section discusses assessment, giving information, and examples of both formal and authentic procedures.