Preface
This site contains the complete text of a research study on emergent literacy of preschool deaf and hearing-impaired children. Although the study was first published in 1991 as my doctoral dissertation, the research methods and findings are still relevant, as evidenced by more recently published studies. At the time of this study, there was a vast body of knowledge on emergent literacy of hearing children but just a handful of studies on literacy development of preschool deaf and hearing-impaired children.
In 1992, I was named as a recipient of one of the finalist awards for the Outstanding Dissertation of the Year by the International Reading Association and I was an invited speaker at the organization's annual conference. Over the next decade, I presented sections of the research and the findings at several major educational conferences and I had articles published in educational journals on specific aspects of the research. Since that time, there have been a significant number of additional studies conducted by other researchers, with my research cited in several of those articles and books. I've included references for some of those studies in the final section of this book.
I want to point out that although the children in the study had hearing losses ranging from moderate to profound, when discussing the study, I've used the term hearing-impaired because that is the way the school district identified the children and the program. However, in the introduction and methodology sections, I've made changes and refer to the larger population as deaf and hearing-impaired since that is a more accurate description of the children in this study. All of the children in the study came from hearing families and none, at the time of the study, used American Sign Language. Therefore, I used deaf rather than Deaf, which is more frequently used to represent members of the Deaf community. The children in this study who had profound hearing losses communicated primarily in signed English while others who had moderate to severe hearing losses communicated with gestures and some oral language.
Seven children participated in my dissertation research. I followed them for nine months, observing them engaging in literacy events, as well as other language related activities. I spent several months analyzing hundreds of hours of observations and over 130 drawing and writing samples, some of which I've included in the book. The findings section, which comprises forty-five percent of the book, is the narrative story of the children's journey into literacy.
I originally planned to offer the book for sale on popular ebook sites, but then decided to create a website for it for dissemination to a wider audience. I hope that readers who are involved with deaf and hearing-impaired children will gain useful insight from the study.