This chapter presents instructional strategies designed to cognitively engage and empower DHH students with disabilities who use American Sign Language. These strategies build on psycholinguistic abilities that each student brings to the reading task. Skills are developed through teacher scaffolding and modeling, to demonstrate effective decision-making for decoding and meaning-making. Students engage in a continuum of practices that increase their participation in the reading process through a gradual release of responsibility. These strategies are applied to several DHH students with disabilities. The first two were observed across several years, providing evidence of their reading improvement and their learning trajectories to support more accurate future planning. Each student's reading is examined using the miscue procedure and a scored retelling. Based on these results, reading strategies are identified to address key areas of need that enhance their competence and reading independence. The chapter concludes with how these practices promote high expectations and achievement.
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The assessment of the reading strengths and needs of the case studies presented in this chapter were conducted using a miscue analysis procedure and scored retelling. The students all used American Sign Language (ASL) for reading their English texts. This type of ASL “read-aloud/sign-aloud” procedures provides observable and measurable evidence of a student’s meaning-making and cognitive processes used for reading a piece of text. The readers are video recorded to support scoring accuracy and subsequent analysis (Luft, 2018, 2020).
Miscues have been successfully performed across a wide range of strong and struggling readers, various U.S. dialects, among diverse languages including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (K. Goodman et al., 2012; Y. Goodman et al., 2014), and with readers who are DHH (Chaleff & Ritter, 2001; Gennaoui & Chaleff, 2000; Luft, 2009, 2020). They provide a bias-free, systematic, and comprehensive examination of reading strategy use that is documented through quantitative and qualitative analysis. The reading procedure asks students to read/sign “aloud” in their preferred language, with skilled and fluent evaluators performing the analysis. The assessment matches student responses with the text to identify correct and incorrect or alternative sign choices. The assessment examines individual text words and signs, but also across text and sign phrases and sentences. The phrase- and sentence-based analysis allows for the English-to-ASL cross-language examination in that it focuses on the student’s sign choices as evidence of meaning-making and comprehension processes (Luft, 2020). This process has unique applicability to DHH students in that most paper-and-pencil reading assessments typically assess based on sign-to-word matches. Because ASL is linguistically different from English (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, 2021), students’ conceptually-accurate ASL interpretations of English text may be scored as incorrect by most assessments. Most importantly, this scoring often masks students’ true reading abilities.