This reprinted article of a 1966 study found that 38 children with deafness who had learned to communicate manually before entrance to school were superior in reading, speech reading, and written language compared to 38 children with deafness who had not learned to communicate manually before school entrance. (CR)

A study examined the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in 29 elementary children enrolled in a residential school for students with deafness. Reading ability was significantly correlated to language ability, but not to phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness did not contribute to any variance in reading ability. (Contains…

A study identified social, educational, and demographic characteristics of 30 postsecondary students who demonstrated strong reading and writing skills. Factors included were parental involvement in early education and educational decisions, extensive family communication, early exposure to and intensive experiences with reading and writing, and…

Six hearing-impaired and 14 hearing adults, all with normal vision, viewed segments of captioned movies on television under 5 conditions of blur. The study found that, if a person has even a slight visual problem, the caption letters under normal television viewing conditions are too small for maximum reading performance. (Author/JDD)

Two studies investigated interactions among position of adjunct questions (inserted before or after sections of instructional prose), reading ability, and direct versus indirect learning outcomes for 74 deaf postsecondary and 100 hearing middle school students. Different effects were observed for deaf and hearing readers and for different levels…

This study of 53 deaf adolescents at a residential school and their parents found that parents who used total communication had children whose self-esteem scores were higher than those of children whose parents used an oral-only method of communication. A positive relationship was also found between student self-esteem and reading level.…

This study, involving 41 hearing foreign students, sought to determine the suitability of using the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) to determine the English reading skills of deaf international college applicants. Results indicated that a TOEFL score between 400 and 500 correlated with a reading grade level of less than 8.0.…

This study of 78 prelingually deaf children (ages 6-13) who were educated orally found that children up to 9 years old seemed to process written words by means of visual codes. Older children tended to differentiate and preferred either a visual or speech-based strategy, with the latter associated with better reading performance. (Author/JDD)

The results of a multistep process to begin identifying best practices in deaf education are presented. To identify current practices, a survey was conducted of the literature, the Web sites of professional organizations, and states' education Web sites, which yielded a number of commonly discussed practices. Ten of the more highly cited practices…

Interviews with 16 deaf high school students and 9 teachers found that teachers underestimated the extent of students' independent comprehension of 3 types of text. The text perceived to be most difficult by both teachers and students was the most interesting to students (but not teachers) and fostered use of a greater variety of metacognitive…