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Literacy and the Deaf: Ed.D. Candidate Jessica Scott

For doctoral candidate Jessica Scott, Ed.M.’08, the fact that many deaf children across the country graduate high school reading at a fourth-grade level is a major problem.

“That’s just not good enough or acceptable,” Scott says. “We want deaf children to have the same opportunities as everyone else.”

For this reason, Scott focuses her research on ways that deaf students can increase their English and literacy skills.  When she first arrived at HGSE, she intended on earning her master’s degree and leaving to work as a reading specialist. However, within two months at the school, she realized the one-year program wouldn’t be enough for her. “I had more questions than I did answers,” she says. “This population [deaf students] is not often addressed. I wanted to be a part of looking for answers.”

It was while working as a teacher at a high school for the deaf in Alaska that Scott noticed the difficulty students had reading. In most cases, students had acquired basic reading comprehension but struggled to understand nuance and symbolism within stories. “Most students use American Sign Language (ASL) and they are technically bilingual. Many have the same struggles as English Language Learners might have,” she says. “A lot of students misused pronouns or, for instance, the conjugation of the ‘be’ word.”

Research looking at bilingual students often reveals struggles in reading comprehension. However, one ongoing issue with deaf students is the general lack of understanding about the population. “It’s an awareness issue and a new topic that people haven’t considered,” Scott says, regarding the notion that these students are technically bilingual. “For a lot of these [deaf] students, signed language is their first language and English is a second language.”

There are different forms of signed language, two of which are ASL and signed English, which follows the English language structure and word order using hands. Unlike signed English, ASL doesn’t follow English word order and instead relies on the use of space to set up scenarios or ideas. For example, when ASL signing about two characters, a person would use spatial organization to indicate the character to which he is referring and use facial expression as part of the grammar.

During an early study, Scott researched a school which had switched from using signed English to ASL. She intended to study the students’ writing ability only to discover that there were many issues with the school structure, particularly inconsistencies among the many teachers who had adopted a strict learning process and several other teachers who had abandoned such changes.

“The take away was that, even with all the motivation and training a school gets from outside, the way the school was structured and how a supervisor was not able to oversee what was happening impacted the learning outcomes,” Scott says. “Because leadership was not present, the change wasn’t happening as they thought it would.”

Beyond challenges of school leadership and structure, many deaf students simply struggle to learn English, which makes going to college even more difficult. For this reason, Scott hopes her dissertation will determine whether there is a link between students who do well on ASL assessments and their understanding of academic English.

“There’s no reason if someone is deaf that he or she couldn’t go to college and get a degree like anyone else,” she says, “but in order to do that they need to have a strong grasp of English.”

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