Comprehension Strategies of Two Deaf Readers

Strategies for reading comprehension used by two deaf college students as they discussed assigned readings with their teacher and classmates are here shown in examples categorized, tallied, and compared. Both were active users of strategies, and their pattern of strategy use was similar: interpreting, questioning, paraphrasing, and integrating were the strategies most used. The student reader who preferred expressing and receiving English-like sign manifested a higher proportion of inaccurate interpretations and paraphrases than did the student reader who preferred receiving and expressing American Sign Language (ASL), primarily because the former was unfamiliar with written linguistic cues and conventions of narrative prose, but also because of distractions from her personal experience. The comparison suggests that competence in reading is more closely related to text-based competencies than to the kind of face-to-face language the reader brings to the text.