This article describes how teaching deaf students to read has been challenging and contentious, yet, one crucial attribute to developing reading skills is early exposure to American Sign Language (ASL). ASL seemed to serve as a bridge to achieving English literacy and academic success partly because early use of ASL enables deaf students to…

This paper attends to languaging in the context of visually oriented communities of sign language users through the concept of "chaining." I define chaining as the patterned, routine ways of interlinking different linguistic and multimodal elements. The goal of this paper is to discuss the concepts of chaining, languaging and…

Encouraging relaxed and playful interaction over stories naturally fosters language interaction and both preliteracy [hereafter (pre)literacy skills] and literacy without anxiety. Reading for pleasure is valuable for young hearing children -- we know that, it is among the most beloved family rituals. In this article we argue that reading for…