Deaf College Students' Reading Comprehension and Strategy Use

Abstract

Two comprehension studies were conducted with 46 deaf college students. In the first, 20 deaf college students representing higher and lower reading-ability levels were tested for correctly stating the main idea of a passage, answering content questions, indicating their understanding of the words and phrases, and recognizing a topically incongruent sentence embedded in the passage. The results suggest that deaf students profess a better understanding of what they read than they are able to demonstrate. The students' inability to identify a topically incongruent sentence in the passage further suggests a need for them to more carefully and accurately evaluate their understanding of what they are reading. A second study investigated the effect of strategy review instruction on deaf college students' comprehension of short reading passages. Students reading at a higher level showed improved comprehension on the posttraining passage, but students reading at a lower level did not. Similarly, the control group of deaf students comparable to the higher-level readers did not show improved comprehension.

Evidence‐based practice in educating deaf and hard‐of‐hearing children: teaching to their cognitive strengths and needs

“…In general, DHH students appear to be relatively poor at assessing their reading comprehension and often consider themselves to be good readers even when they are largely unaware of what that means (Ewoldt 1986;Kelly, Albertini, and Shannon 2001). Teachers and parents may inadvertently foster such behaviours in young DHH readers by underestimating their reading abilities and thus demonstrating in the literacy domain the over-directiveness often seen among hearing adults interacting with DHH children.…”

Deaf students’ metacognitive awareness during language comprehension

“…The greatest differences between the better and less-skilled readers were found in their evaluating comprehension. As in the Gibbs (1989) and Kelly, Albertini, and Shannon (2001) studies, there was no hearing comparison group, but only one of the 11 participants was found to be at the highest level of performance in terms of the quantity and quality of metacomprehension strategies reported. In general, then, deaf students from secondary school through university appear to have relatively limited metacognitive awareness with regard to reading, but rarely have they been compared to same-aged hearing students.…”

“…Participants were not asked to indicate how they would correct or overcome those problems. Kelly, Albertini, and Shannon (2001) examined the extent to which deaf students were able to identify the main ideas of academic texts and their awareness of whether or not passages made sense. Two groups of deaf university students, one reading at the eighth grade level and one reading at the ninth grade level, proved to be extremely poor in both respects.…”

Reading me back into school : successful deaf and hard of hearing readers in the mainstreamed setting

“…Kelly et al's research (2001) on the use of reading strategies by deaf college students found that deaf and hard of hearing readers of higher ability benefit more from different reading strategies than readers of lower ability. Teachers are responsible for planning differentiated instruction based on reading ability (Kelly et al, 2001). The study also indicated that teachers should focus on the following strategies: determining the meaning of text rather than vocabulary (word by word), synthesizing the main idea, promoting background knowledge references and relating to new knowledge, using authentic text, and developing an idea of coherence (Kelly et al, 2001).…”

“…For example, a strategy could include inserting random sentences in text passages in order for students to practice finding sentences that do not make sense or belong in the text (Kelly et al, 2001). This is an important strategy to enhance the learning experience of deaf and hard of hearing readers.…”