How to Facilitate Reading Acquisition for Deaf Children. The Role of Phonological Skills

This paper analyzes the relationship between deaf children's phonological skills in preschool and their word recognition performance in grade 2.A study is presented whose aims were explicitly to develop phonological awareness in deaf pre-school children through teaching and to determine what strategies (spelling and/or phonological clues) deaf students use to solve metaphonological tasks, given their exposure to systems complementary to oral language (Cued Speech) or frankly different from oral language (Spanish Sign Language). An ancillary goal was to determine whether explicit teaching facilitates the initial learning of reading in the first grade of elementary school and whether this effect is maintained into second grade. A case study was carried out. The subjects were children with profound prelocutive deafness at a bilingual school who received explicit instruction in phonological abilities in pre-school. Other children of this school who did not receive the same instruction acted as a control group. All the participants were assessed in metaphonological and reading skills over five school years. The results of this research showed that phonological awareness among pre-school deaf children can be developed before reading ability through explicit training by means of Cued Speech, and that such development leads deaf children to use phonological strategies in reading. It was also found that pre-school training in phonological awareness facilitates subsequent reading acquisition. The positive effect could still be observed in grade 2. The data support the idea that deaf children can acquire phonological awareness, thus underlining the need to introduce metaphonological activities into the curriculum for deaf children to forestall the difficulties these children usually have with the phonological facet of language and learning to read.