Early Reading for Young Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children: Alternative Frameworks

Deaf children can develop reading skills by using a visual language to bridge meaning to English print without the use of English auditory phonology. To this end, five deafcentric frameworks are described that take into account the use of visual language and visual learning, as well as the use of deaf cultural role models in the teaching of reading. Moving away from the deficit model, these frameworks focus on Deaf1 students in the act of reading in order to document their actual behaviors using a bilingual American Sign Language/English philosophy. These five models suggest that there is more involved in reading than simply bottom-up code-based strategies based on spoken language. Multiple pathways are recommended, based on the work of Treisman, and his idea of “fault tolerant” approaches, which permit and encourage multiple pathways for deaf readers.