Reading, Special Education, and Deaf Children
Supalla & Byrne
There is a tendency to equate access in a curriculum with access to information, or
access to activities. But a curriculum is not information or activities, it is a plan for
learning, and therefore the learning has to be accessible. (pp. 14-15)
Rose (2000) explained that 'access to information' must be differentiated from 'access to
learning' as the former requires "the greatest amount of support possible at all times" (p. 68). The
latter is a characteristic of UDL and addresses how a child must have "access to the learning itself,
and that they experience changes in their knowledge and skills and grow in their capacity to learn
more" (p. 68). What this suggests is that educators must be careful, given that all children need to
be ensured the opportunity to learn. Even though information may be available, it may remain
inaccessible and therefore not learnable.
There is an additional argument that Rose (2000) made for UDL in that printed books
present "information in one manner for everyone, yet students' varied learning needs and styles
call for alternative formats" (p. 67). What this suggests is that the English text can be a source of
reading problems. Text manipulation has been proposed as a way of making the text more
accessible leading to improved reading performances (Ralabate, 2011). Imagine an English text
that is altered to the point that it resembles the morpho-syntactic structure of ASL. Deaf children
should find this type of text more readable.
In fact, a charter school in Arizona pursued this kind of text manipulation under the name
of ASL gloss. Specifically, ASL gloss encompasses a few components to help ensure that deaf
children experience a transition from ASL to English literacy during the early elementary school
years. The first publication made on this topic (S. Supalla, Wix, & McKee, 2001) was published
outside the field of deaf education. Only recently, the long-standing journal for deaf education,
American Annals of the Deaf (Volume 161, Number 5, Winter 2017) published a special issue that
explored the concept of how deaf children may benefit from reading in ASL. ASL gloss is included
in this issue (S. Supalla, Cripps, & Byrne, 2017), but the focus of that article was to defend the
integrity of the text manipulation concept.
The next step to undertake is to become proactive and examine what special education has
to offer in teaching English literacy to deaf children. This article offers a unique opportunity to
compare ASL gloss with what has been attempted with teaching English literacy to deaf children.
Any limitation to the special education practices will provide insights on how to initiate reform to
improve deaf children's potential for becoming fluent readers. English literacy for deaf children
should not be defined by poorly conceived classroom practices.
ASL Gloss as a Reading Instruction Model
For this section, a review of key concepts and examples from S. Supalla's A Sketch on
Reading Methodology for Deaf Children (2017) will lay the foundational premises for ASL gloss
(readers who are interested in a research review supporting signed language reading are
encouraged to read that paper directly). The Arizona charter school is the only known site in the
United States that had embraced ASL gloss and followed the Universal Design for Learning to
provide alternative formats in teaching reading to children with disabilities. Educators at the
charter school understood the importance of deaf students having access to the learning itself and
must "experience changes in their knowledge and skills and grow in their capacity to learn more"
in Rose's own words as mentioned at the beginning of this paper. It can be said that an UDL
curriculum was developed and used at the charter school.
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No.1 – Spring/Summer 2018
37