Reading Methodology for Deaf Children
Supalla
Making English Readable for Deaf Children
As expected for curriculum, instruction, and assessment alignment, the glossing approach
adopted at the Arizona charter school had an impact on what reading materials looked like, how
a teacher taught reading skills, and how deaf children’s reading skills were assessed. The
educators and researchers were sensitive to the fact that deaf children enrolled at the charter
school were young and had not yet learned to read (e.g., kindergartners). Recall that medieval
students would read gloss passages attached to Latin text. The medieval students were older and
accomplished readers. They read in their own language to learn about Latin. No truly
intermediary system is in use here. This is where the idea of doing more by glossing the English
text itself emerged at the charter school. The English text was manipulated to the point that it
resembled ASL’s morpho-syntactic structure. To distinguish an ASL text from that of a regular
text, the printed English words or roots are fully capitalized. The ordering of words in a given
sentence may be changed (as ASL has a flexible word order as compared to English). A set of
conventions were created to help fully represent ASL’s grammatical structure by using an
underline or a symbol attached to the beginning or end of a basic English word or root, for
example.
True to the objective of glossing, the English text is made clear to deaf children through
the nec essary manipulation. The children at the charter school could read the text word by word
when it was consistent with ASL morphologically and syntactically. It is important to note that
text manipulation has been recognized as a way of improving reading performance for all
children. Ralabate (2011) explained that text manipulation is critical for improving the reading
outcomes of students with disabilities. For whatever reading difficulties there may be, the text
itself can be problematic and manipulation can make all the difference.
Hundreds of gloss books were created at the charter school, derived from children’s
literature and basal readers. It is now necessary to explain what gloss text looks like exactly. The
basis for creating gloss text is interlinear translation. The English sentence example below
showing before and after manipulation will help clarify the technique:
Before Manipulation: The dog is chasing the cat.
After Manipulation:
DOG NOW CHASE>IX=3 CAT
S. Supalla and Cripps (2011) produced the sentence examples above and provided a
detailed description of how glossing took place with the original English sentence as follows:
[The gloss sentence] depicts four English words all capitalized to represent the
four signs produced as an equivalent of the English sentence composed of the six
words… [s]tructurally, no definite article is used in the ASL gloss sentence,
which is correct for the signed language. The ASL gloss sentence also indicates a
rough equivalence of the present progressive tense in English, with the insertion
of NOW as a separate word (or “time sign”) before the verb. In addition, the ASL
verb CHASE undergoes a third person object agreement inflection (i.e., the
movement of the verb is [modified] to agree with the location of the cat in the
SASLJ, Vol. 1, No. 1 – Fall/Winter 2017
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