Considerations for Designing Practice for Deaf Readers

Low reading comprehension persists among deaf readers, and recent research indicates that low automaticity in recognizing words and parsing sentence patterns is a significant source of the difficulty. When a learner does manage to gain an insight about some aspect of printed English, there may be limited impact on comprehension until the new knowledge can be applied fluently because the multiple cognitive demands of reading call for completing basic linguistic operations with a minimum of conscious effort. The research literature agrees that the route to improved automaticity is effective practice, and, thus, practice is also a likely route to increased comprehension. This article presents considerations to guide the design of practice for deaf readers. Certain of these notions are relatively applied in nature and may shape practice activities directly, for example, the discussion of research-based guidelines for tailoring the sequence and composition of practice items. Other parts of the discussion, such as those related to word recognition, are more theoretical than directive, and they imply research hypotheses that can and should be tested empirically. A principal point of this article is that without appreciable improvements in practice, the reading of many deaf students will remain largely unimproved.