In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conversely, two of the students in Group 3 (at a simple sentence level) had a consistent Norwegian milieu. The purpose here was to attempt to describe the various languages and modes a child with hearing loss might encounter in school and home and to assess the effect of such experience on literacy. The results indicate clearly that language experience is a fundamental factor of critical importance to a child’s literacy. The focus on the language milieu of the project makes a special contribution and also raises questions and hypotheses that must be pursued further experimentally with the variables assessed here. There are, of course, other factors such as etiology, age of onset of hearing loss, and socioeconomic factors, which might affect literacy. The degree of hearing loss is perhaps the one universally considered crucial factor. The common categories used in Norway are, “deaf” (> 96-dB loss) and “severe hearing loss” (71- to 95-dB loss) and were of main interest in planning the project. It turned out, however, that 17 (8 percent) of the students included in the study had hearing losses of less than 71 dB. Comparison of the two first groups (deaf and severe hearing loss) showed that they had very similar scores with nearly identical means and standard deviations on syntax, coding, and reading. Those students who were classified as hard of hearing had, on average, scores of about one standard deviation higher on all the tests. In order to perform another quantitative analysis of the effect of hearing level, the students were compared on the basis of the traditional measure of hearing loss, the dB hearing threshold in the best ear, based on an average score of 500, 1,000, and 2,000 Hz. (See Powers [2003] for a related discussion of this measure.) For the present subjects, these scores range from 30 to 113 dB and form a smooth distribution without any gaps corresponding to the above categorizations of hearing loss. The scores tended to cluster at the high end, which reflect the initial aim to obtain students categorized as “deaf” and with “severe hearing loss.” The correlations between the dB threshold measure and syntax, decoding , and reading are only about 0.30. Although this indicates that the greater the hearing loss, the poorer the performance on the tests, this association is of questionable practical usefulness in predicting performance on tests of literacy. Moreover, a multiple regression analysis showed that the correlation between scores on reading and decoding are not confounded by the students ’ hearing loss as measured by the dB thresholds. Scores on decoding and reading are more useful in understanding differences in literacy. The Relationship between Language Experience and Development 105 GENERAL CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS The results from the study of the students’ milieu provide additional and new information about students with hearing loss and demonstrate the importance of understanding their linguistic experience in analyzing information about their language development and planning appropriate educational programs for them. One of the key topics of this unique Norwegian study is the emphasis on questions regarding the access students have to various languages at home and in school. In regard to literacy, these results document that if one is to be competent in reading, it is necessary to be competent in the language of the text, in this case, Norwegian. That decoding was also significant is important . It adds weight to other studies which have shown that competent deaf readers can and do utilize decoding in the reading process. The title of the Norwegian main project was “Bilingualism and Literacy in Deaf Children,” and it is important to consider the larger picture of what it means to be literate. Literacy means more than the skills of reading and writing and has been conceptualized in different ways. Researchers in this field have characterized the differences between spoken and written language as “different ways of learning because they are different ways of knowing (Halliday 1989), the “sustained meaning-making that is characteristic of written language” (Wells 1981), and the “ultimate tool for thinking which requires grasping not simply what is written but what is meant” (Bruner 1990). If the goal for students with hearing loss is to become literate, then the goals for an educational program have to go beyond the development of face-to-face language and the skills of reading and writing to this higher level of using language cognitively in thinking and organizing mental events. However, goals for educational programs cannot be determined by...

Share