Reading, Special Education, and Deaf Children
Supalla & Byrne
It is necessary to look closely at how the manipulated text, or glossed text, is created. The
English text is subject to what is known as interlinear translation in a glossed version, sentence by
sentence, with the words rearranged according to ASL's morpho-syntactic structure. A set of gloss
conventions are available to help ensure that the text represents ASL as accurately as possible.
Close to 300 literature and basal readers for children have led to the creation of an ASL gloss
library (see the Gloss Institute at http://www.glossinstitute.org/inventory-of-gloss-books.html for
the collection of glossed books for use with deaf children).
It is important to keep in mind that glossed books make up only one component of ASL
gloss. There are other components that warrant later investigation. The demonstration of a selected
English sentence and its glossed version is as follows:
Original English sentence: The dog is chasing the rabbit.
Glossed version: DOG NOW CHASE>IX=3 RABBIT.
A deaf child can experience linguistic comprehension when reading given that the glossed
text matches with the ASL the child knows. The glossed English words are all capitalized to
represent the four ASL signs, which is the total number of ASL signs in the sentence (with six
being the total number for the original English sentence). Full capitalization with the words is an
important cue for deaf children to know that the text they read is ASL, not English. Structurally,
no definite article is used in the ASL sentence, which is correct for the signed language. The
glossed sentence also has the insertion of NOW as a separate word (or "time sign") before the verb
to indicate a semantic equivalence of the present progressive tense in English. Note that the verb
CHASE undergoes a third-person object agreement inflection. This involves the verb redirected in
its movement to agree with the location of the rabbit in the signing space (with the attachment of
the gloss convention >IX=3 to the verb representing inflection of the sentence). Finally, the
underline under DOG represents the topicalization shown visually in ASL through the use of the
signer's raised eyebrows indicating that the dog is the topic of the sentence.
Related to cognition, the glossed sentence example represents what deaf children think
inside their heads. For the general phenomenon or event of how a dog is chasing a rabbit, deaf
children will read the glossed sentence based on the correct number of words (i.e., four, not six).
This includes reading inflectional markers and facial markers, which contribute to the well-
formedness and expressive power of ASL. Critically, deaf children are able to read 'aloud' the
glossed text (by reading and signing at the same time). Their oral reading performance can be
successfully assessed through the running record (or miscue analysis), a well-known reading
development measure commonly used among hearing children (Cripps, 2008).
Additionally, deaf children at the Arizona charter school had the capacity to decipher new
and unfamiliar English words when reading a glossed text. The second component of ASL gloss,
The Resource Book (RB) acts as an English-ASL dictionary. Ideally, glossed books are all read
through the use of apps. Such apps allow deaf children to read on their iPad and click English
words and find their meaning by reading the sign equivalents via the RB. Thousands of English
words paired with written signs are included in the RB. With the glossed sentence example
discussed earlier, deaf children can look up the RB for any of the words. The RB format looks like
this:
CHASE………...QQ4ce
DOG………........Hde5
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No.1 – Spring/Summer 2018
38