Deaf Children Learning 

Projects

Literacy Teaching for Deaf Pupils: Morphological and Visual Inputs - Supported by The Nuffield Foundation

Literacy levels of deaf people have been consistently low for decades. Only 2% of deaf school-leavers read at age appropriate levels. Learning to read is difficult for severely and profoundly deaf people for two reasons. The first is that letters represent sounds and they have no direct experience of speech-sounds. The second is that deaf children have a restricted English vocabulary, which interferes with reading comprehension.

This project proposes to develop and test the effectiveness of a programme that uses visual coding of prefixes, stems and suffixes – which are units of meaning used to form words and are termed ‘morphemes’ – to improve deaf children’s literacy. Teaching deaf pupils about morphemes is hypothesised to improve their word recognition skills and to increase their English vocabulary. Although hearing children use morphemes in word recognition and benefit from systematic teaching about morphemes, this type of intervention has not yet been tested with deaf children.


Nuffield Foundation Website     

Using deaf children's visual skills to promote mathematical learning -Supported by the RNID

You may be surprised to know that most deaf children show a severe delay in mathematics learning. Why is this?

The average deaf school-leaver, aged 16-17 years old, leaves school with the mathematical skills of a 10-12 year old, which can have a huge impact on their future prospects. However, 3 and 4 year-olds actually perform better than hearing children at representing the number of items in a set when all the items are presented at the same time in a spatial display. Deaf children are not so good at representing the number of objects presented to them in a temporal sequence. For example, when a teacher poses the question, “If Peter has four apples, then his daddy gives him two apples, how many apples does Peter have now?” They do much better if the numbers are presented to them in a simultaneous visual display.

This RNID supported project will explore how deaf children use their visual and spatial skills to do maths. The information gathered from this project will be used to develop activities to promote their mathematical ability.

The project will lead to improvements in the way mathematics is taught to young deaf children. A good solid start in mathematics should equip children with the skills needed to effectively learn mathematics and open up new opportunities to them.

RNID Website

Family-School Partnership to Promote Deaf Children's Literacy - Supported by the National Deaf Children's Society - NDCS

There are two types of connection between oral and written English. One is between letters and sounds. Many deaf children find it difficult to learn letter-sound correspondences because the subtle sound discriminations required for learning letter-sound correspondences may be outside the range of discriminations that they can make. Teachers and specialists have developed many ways to help deaf children improve their ability to distinguish the different sounds of the English language.  The second connection between oral and written language is through morphemes, which are units of meaning that have a consistent spelling. The word "magician", for example, has two morphemes: "magic" + "ian". The stem "magic" is preserved in the word "magician" even though the sounds change. The ending, "ian", is used in "magician" and in many other words to refer to "people who do something" (mathematician, technician) or "people who come from a particular place" (Italian, Brazilian). This second connection between oral and written language can be made more accessible to deaf students through teaching.

This project consists of designing, testing, and assessing the effectiveness of a range of materials that aim at teaching deaf children about how morphemes work in written English. Teachers start the process by introducing the children to the idea that words are made of units of meaning and also showing them how specific morphemes convey meaning: the "s" at the end of nouns tells us about plurals and "ed" at the end of verbs tells us that an action happened in the past. The children then take home games and books where these ideas are explored and put into practice in many ways. The NDCS played a decisive role in encouraging the researchers to work with families as well as schools.

During 2008/09 the resources are being tested. They will be open to everyone once they have been assessed.

NDCS Website

To go to the Project Website click here

Publications by the Research Team

Last modified by Dr Diana Burman - 15 September 2008