The Benefit of Assessment-Based Language and Reading Instruction: Perspectives From a Case Study

Transcription

1 The Benefit of Assessment-Based Language and Reading Instruction: Perspectives From a Case Study Diane Corcoran Nielsen University of Kansas Barbara Luetke-Stahlman We present a case study of the language and literacy development of a deaf child, Marcy, from preschool through sixth grade. The purpose of the project was to examine the connection between language and reading and to provide insight into the relationships between them. To compile the case study, we analyzed data from nine years of follow-up, including listening, speech articulation, semantic, syntactic, reading, and writing information drawn from a number of informal and formal assessments. Annual evaluation of language and literacy skills was used to select educational placements, as well as instructional methods, strategies, and materials. Given that Marcy began school at 4 years of age, mute and without expressive language of any form (oral or sign), it may at first appear remarkable that she read narrative and expository text as did her hearing peers by sixth grade, because a substantial body of research shows that most deaf students read at the fourth-grade level by high school graduation (review by Paul, 1998). However, those responsible for Marcy s education prevented reading failure by carefully planning, instituting, and monitoring elements of language and literacy instruction. We present Marcy s progress and instruction by grade level and discuss it within the framework of phases/ stages of reading development. We hope that the resulting case study may serve as an example of the language-reading connection, an awareness important not only for the literacy instruction of deaf and language-challenged children but for hearing students as well. The language and reading abilities and challenges of a deaf child may at first appear different from those of a hearing child. But we have learned in our work to- Correspondence should be sent to Diane Corcoran Nielsen, Department of Teaching and Leadership, 446 J. R. Pearson Hall, 1122 West Campus Road, Universityof Kansas, Lawrence, KS ( dnielsen@ ku.edu) Oxford University Press gether that when students live in the inner city, have special learning needs, or have a hearing loss, they often share the challenge of learning English not informal, routine, daily English, but the decontexualized language required to comprehend and express the thinking skills required in school. In this case study, we have tried to detail the important aspects of the life of a deaf child, Marcy, as she moves through the stages of developing into a proficient reader, acquiring cognitive-academic language, as well as reading and writing proficiency. We hope to provide insight into several complex processes and relationships among them. Marcy was born in Bulgaria in December 1987 and lived in an orphanage for the first 4 years of her life. She was a deaf and mute child, communicating through mime and physical behavior. If she were unhappy or scared, she would throw a tantrum. She did not have a hearing aid or any other assistive listening device. She could not hear spoken language, nor was she provided access to it visually (sign). When Marcy was adopted in January 1992, and came to live in the United States, she had never cut with scissors, colored, or been exposed to literacy activities. Marcy moved to a suburb of a large Midwestern city with her adoptive parents. She had three older sisters, one of whom was deaf. She was enrolled in a public school program for deaf preschoolers the day after her arrival. Marcy attended the same school for the rest of that year and for a second year of preschool, as well as for kindergarten through sixth grade. As professors

2 150 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 7:2 Spring 2002 with different areas of expertise, deaf education, and reading, we had access to 9 years of communication and literacy data, because one of us is Marcy s mother. Terminology As a deaf educator and a reading professor, we began discussing the connection between Marcy s oral and written language acquisition. We realized that the meaning of some of the terminology used in the field of deaf education might differ from how the same terms are used in the field of reading. For example, in deaf education, the term oral language has to be distinguished from the terms of receptive and expressive language. When a child is hearing, one thinks about oral and written language as marking expressive competency, but a deaf child can be mute and demonstrate age-appropriate semantic and syntactic language abilities. Therefore, oral language or speech is identified as but one modality of expressing language. A deaf child might also communicate through sign alone (without speech) or through a combination of partially intelligible speech and sign, expressed simultaneously. Thus, via various modalities, the same use (syntactic), meaning (semantic), and form (pragmatic) aspects of language evidenced by a hearing child can be demonstrated by a deaf child. We used the term communication to include speech articulation, speechreading, and language use, as well as listening ability (or audition). In our work, we used the term language to refer to either oral or manual English. Further, we discussed basic, informal, routine language as different from decontextualized (Snow & Tabors, 1993) or cognitiveacademic language proficiency (Cummins, 1984). This language-reading connection is supported in the literature (Apel & Swank, 1999; Newcomer & Hammil, 1975; Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 1996; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Freeman, 1984; Tunmer, 1989; Tunmer & Hoover, 1992; Tunmer & Nesdale, 1985; Vogel, 1974; Warren-Leubecker, 1987). Last, in more general discussions of deaf education, there are always two possible languages to consider: American Sign Language (ASL) and English. Deaf students in the United States might have teachers who use ASL or they might be instructed in spoken or signed English. Most often, various combinations of these two languages are used (Paul, 1998). However, this case study involved a child whose teachers and parents used English, signed exactly as they spoke it and that is the language Marcy acquired as well. Signing a Language English was Marcy s first language because her parents, who are hearing, communicated in English as their dominant and home language. For several reasons they chose to use a system of simultaneously spoken and signed English, called Signing Exact English, or SEE (Gustason, Zawolkow, & Pfetzing, 1973). One reason was that administrators in the school district in which the family lived decided to use this instructional input several years before the family moved to the area, and Marcy s parents believed that her exposure to the same language at home and at school would benefit her as she acquired a first language (Luetke-Stahlman, 1988, 1990). In addition, Marcy s parents were already using SEE with their older deaf daughter, and they wanted to use the same sign system with Marcy. School administrators of the deaf education program in which Marcy was enrolled and her parents were aware of studies that reported the literacy benefit of using SEE (see review by Luetke-Stahlman, 1993). Those at school valued the use of SEE, attempted to sign English grammar accurately, and were supervised and evaluated as to their proficiency (Mayer & Lowenbraum, 1990). Teachers and interpreters were rated by a state evaluation system, and those working with Marcy had earned the highest SEE rating. Thus, both professionals at school and Marcy s family members attempted to accurately represent the morphology and syntax of English. SEE is the only instructional manual input in which this is possible. SEE was designed to represent the grammar of English in several ways (Gustason et al., 1973). First, different signs are used to represent root words so that the various pronouns, contractions, and verb forms are distinguished visually as different words. (e.g., tree, woods, forest, orchard, and jungle ). The SEE system also includes signs that are added to root words or base signs so that inflections and derivations are produced. In a similar manner, other parts of language such as nominative and adjectival forms can be distin-

3 Assessment-Based Language and Reading Instruction 151 guished. For example, the words electric, electrician, electrical, electricity are all signed using different combinations of signs in SEE, but not in other manual systems. Given the empirically substantiated relationship between English and reading found with hearing children (Adams, 1990; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Tunmer & Hoover, 1992), it seems obvious that the reading achievement of deaf children would be adversely affected if parents and teachers did not communicate using grammatically accurate models of English syntax that children can comprehend (Paul & Quigley, 1994). As expected, researchers in deaf education have found that better English grammar knowledge is correlated with higher reading achievement (see Babb, 1979; Brasal & Quigley, 1977; Luetke-Stahlman, 1988, 1990; Moeller & Johnson, 1988; Moores & Sweet, 1990). For example, Luetke-Stahlman (1988, 1990) reported that first- and second-grade deaf students who were exposed to SEE read significantly better than deaf subjects who used speech-only, ASL, or other invented English sign systems in which the grammar of English was only partially provided. There is no research that documents age-appropriate reading achievement of deaf students who are instructed only in ASL (see review by Paul, 1998). Data Collection When Marcy first entered preschool, the teacher of the deaf and the speech-language pathologist conducted an informal assessment of her language skills and an educational team drafted an Individualized Educational Plan (IEP). The federal Individual with Disabilities Education Act requires that such evaluation and planning be conducted at least annually. In the following years, data were collected from a number of informal and formal sources and used to guide discussion at Marcy s annual IEP meetings. Then goals and objectives were written, from which lesson plans were drafted. Formal testing was conducted by both local school personnel and researchers associated with a cochlear implant project at Indiana University, Otologic Research Laboratory. Because Marcy was deaf, many more listening, speech, language, and literacy measures were administered to her throughout the elementary years than typically are administered to hearing children or to children with special needs. (See Appendix 1 for descriptions of these tests.) Her parents, case manager, and the special education director kept copies of Marcy s IEPs, including annual language and literacy assessment summaries. The speech language pathologist at her school kept actual test protocols. Informal assessments were kept by her mother and included copies of notes from observations, checklists, tests taken in various school subjects, writing samples, videotaped language and literacy samples, videotaped lessons, and other such information. In addition to informal assessment, Marcy s educational team deliberately chose to use tests that had been standardized on hearing children to assess her language and literacy progress. This was in part because they could not locate standardized tools recently normed on deaf students; most were standardized years ago. The students sampled primarily used ASL, PSE (which constitutes conceptual ASL signs sequenced in English word order and is also called contact-signing), neither of which were the instructional language to which Marcy was exposed. The deaf children in the samples had attended residential or large day programs, segregated from hearing peers, and this was not representative of Marcy s school programming. Instead, her situation resembled that of 80% of deaf students today (Moores, 1999): Marcy attended public school and was one of only a few students who were deaf or hard of hearing in her classroom or grade. Her work was compared daily to that of hearing students. Currently, most deaf students in the United States are taught by general education teachers, with or without the services of an interpreter or consultation by a teacher of the deaf. For these reasons, educational teams routinely administer standardized tests used by the school district to assess all students with special needs. Results To analyze and discuss the connections between Marcy s language and literacy development, we first organized informal and formal information in a chronology of files by date. For standardized test score data, we independently located scores by year, compared our fig-

4 152 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 7:2 Spring 2002 ures, and rechecked the original test protocols if there were discrepancies. We then converted each score to a percentile (coded as percentile) using the test administration information. Thirty percent of these figures were converted independently from raw scores to percentiles by a professor in special education. There were no discrepancies between his conversions and ours. We used percentile data because we thought most readers were familiar with them (Bender, 1999) and because the various tests in the study employed different types of scoring systems. Two measures, listening and speech articulation, were converted to percentages because percentile scores were not available. After converting the scores, we organized them into tables. The speech and listening development data are presented by year in Table 1. Receptive and expressive language data for Marcy s kindergarten year are provided in Table 2; Table 3 presents first-grade linguistic and reading data, second-grade linguistic and reading data in Table 4 and so forth through sixthgrade data in Table 8. Data from the district curriculum-based reading assessments, collected over the years, is presented in Table 9. Data in Tables 2 through 8 were divided into five columns each, based on a categorization scheme that reflects typical interpretation of a normal distribution curve. A 2nd 15th percentile score falls within two standard deviations below the mean and was considered below average. A 16th 49th percentile score fell within one standard derivation below the mean and was referred to as low average. A score at the 50th percentile was average. A 51st 84th percentile score fell within one standard derivation above the mean and was considered high average. An 85th 98th percentile score fell within two standard deviations above the mean and was considered above average. In this article, we referred to these categories rather than test scores, unless we thought that specific scores helped to illustrate a particular point. Exact test scores are located on the tables for the interested reader, with the exception that the linguistic data collected in the preschool years is presented within the text of the article. This is because there were only two tests given in those years. When the tables were complete, we began to integrate our review of the literature, annual descriptions of Marcy s school experience, and the informal (videotapes, school papers, etc.) and formal information collected each year. To make the case study readable, we chose to include information that exemplified the predominant language and literacy connections, which we supported with results from our review of the literature. We typically presented this information in a sequence that included a description of relevant activities at home and then the characteristics of the school program. We ordered academic data by first discussing listening and speech-articulation progress and then language and literacy information. Receptive semantic language data were usually presented before receptive syntactic data; expressive semantic data before expressive syntactic data. The literacy data were sequenced to include reading, spelling, and writing information. The Preschool Years: Access to Language and Literacy Initial audiometric testing indicated that Marcy had a profound bilateral, sensorineural, unaided hearing loss. That is, she could not hear an airplane flying overhead, let alone human speech. She was fitted with hearing aids soon after her arrival in the United States and wore them daily for 3 months. Aided audiometric data collected during this time illustrated that the hearing aids only minimally improved her ability to detect sound (i.e., 250 Hz at 60 db and 500 Hz at 75 db). In short, Marcy could not hear any sounds in the English speech spectrum even while wearing hearing aids. Marcy was immersed as an observer and participant of simultaneously voiced and signed conversations upon her adoption. Teaching some vocabulary was simply a matter of providing Marcy with sign labels for concepts she already knew (e.g., she learned the basic signs for colors in one afternoon), but most aspects of language were much slower to develop and resulted at times in stimulus-response interactions. For example, a videotaped language sample taken shortly after her arrival shows Marcy eating breakfast beside her older deaf sister. The sister competently models responses to routine breakfast queries from their mother. However, when it is Marcy s turn to request a bowl, then cereal, and finally milk, she imitates the sign WANT as if she does not yet understand the linguistic significance of

5 Table 1 Speech and listening development Grade Preschool 1 Preschool 2 K Year and and 2000 Age in January 4:1 5:1 6:1 7:1 8:1 9:1 and 10:1 11:1 and 12:1 Listening 4:0 4:3 Tried Learn to detect Could discriminate: Highly similar two-and Could not differentiate Began weekly Joined the school development hearing aid, when sound was bababa/tatata; loud/soft three-syllable words that differed in cello lesson orchestra in 5th could not hear present or not. sounds; long/short phonemes sounded place like fab and fall. in 3rd grade. grade and speech. 4:6 sounds; one phoneme alike. Listening ability affected continued in 6th Received from another with 76% spelling of within word grade. cochlear accuracy; comprehended patterns. implant. simple requests in context; 75% correct on minimal pairs test. Speech Initially mute. Articulated single, Articulated phonemes in 96% on the Ling 71% on the Goldman- In 5th grade, speech development highly visible initial positions; 10% on Speech Evaluation; Fristoe Articulation was comprehensible phonemes; in the Goldman-Fristoe 51% on Goldman- Test; trouble articulating 75% of the time for isolation, in a series. Articulation Test; could Fristoe Articulation second syllable of two- both narrative and not produce /g/, /k/, Test; speech was syllable words. expository topics. /gn/, /r/. intelligible 50% in informal conversation. Table 2 Kindergarten (6:1 years of age) Below average Low average Average High average Above average 2 15th percentile 16 49th percentile 50th percentile 51 84th percentile 85 98th percentile Receptive English ASSETT bn PPVT 5 percentile CELF Concepts & directions 9th percentile Sentence structure 16th percentile Expressive English LPT Expressive One Word LPT Multiple Meanings bn Vocabulary Test Similarities 58th percentile Attributes bn 48th percentile Differences 68th percentile LPT total 11th percentile Associations 74th percentile Categories 76th percentile

6 Table 3 First grade (7:1 years of age) Below average Low average Average High average Above average 2 15th percentile 16 49th percentile 50th percentile 51 84th percentile 85 98th percentile Receptive English ASSETT Total 4th percentile PPVT 18th percentile CELF-Oral Directions 5th percentile CELF-Sentence Structure 9th percentile Expressive English ASSETT Total 9th percentile Expressive One Word Vocabulary Test 34th percentile Reading Vocabulary: Gates-MacGinitie 33rd percentile Comprehension: Gates-MacGinitie 34th percentile Table 4 Second grade (8:1 years of age) Below average Low average Average High average Above average 2 15th percentile 16 49th percentile 50th percentile 51 84th percentile 85 98th percentile Receptive English PPVT 2nd percentile TOLD- CELF- TOLD- Grammatical Sentence Structure 50th Picture Vocabulary 9th Understanding 25th percentile percentile percentile Expressive English TOLD- Expressive One Word LPT- Sentence Imitation bn; Vocabulary Test 19th Differences 51st percentile Defining Vocabulary 5th percentile Attributes 62nd percentile percentile; LPT- Grammatical Completion Similarities 20th percentile 9th percentile Categories 23rd percentile LPT- TOLD- Multiple Meanings 15th Word Articulation 37th percentile percentile LPT total 41st percentile LPT Associations 43rd percentile Reading Vocabulary: Gates-MacGinitie 43rd percentile Comprehension: Gates-MacGinitie 40th percentile Woodcock-Johnson 88th percentile

7 Table 5 Third grade (9:1 years of age) Below average Low average Average High average Above average 2 15th percentile 16 49th percentile 50th percentile 51 84th percentile 85 98th percentile Receptive English PPVT 20th percentile CELF- Sentence Structure 50th percentile Expressive English CELF- CELF- Recalling Sentences 1st percentile Word Classes 37th percentile Formulating Sentences 2nd Word Structure 37th percentile percentile Reading Vocabulary Gates-MacGinitie 21st percentile ITBS 27th percentile Comprehension Gates-MacGinitie 47th percentile ITBS 39th percentile Table 6 Fourth grade (10:1 years of age) Below average Low average Average High average Above average 2 15th percentile 16 49th percentile 50th percentile 51 84th percentile 85 98th percentile Receptive English PPVT 20th percentile OWLS 13th percentile Expressive English CELF- LPT- LPT- Formulating Sentences Similarities 26th percentile Differences 66th percentile 4th percentile Associations 39th percentile Multiple Meanings 40th percentile Attributes 42nd percentile Total LPT 44th percentile Categories 49th percentile Reading Vocabulary: Gates-MacGinitie 21st percentile WoodcockRead. Mastery 16th percentile Comprehension: WoodcockRead. Mastery 20th percentile Gates-MacGinitie 62nd percentile

8 Table 7 Fifth grade (11:1 years of age) Below average Low average Average High average Above average 2 15th percentile 16 49th percentile 50th percentile 51 84th percentile 85 98th percentile Receptive English PPVT 25th percentile Expressive English LPT- CELF- CELF- LPT total score 56th LPT- Similarities 7th Formulating Sentences Word Classes 50th percentile Attributes 89th percentile 16th percentile percentile percentile Differences 13th LPTpercentile Categories 23rd percentile Multiple Meanings 23rd percentile Associations 32nd percentile Reading Vocabulary Gates-MacGinitie 35th percentile Woodcock Read. Mastery 25th percentile Comprehension Woodcock Read. Mastery 57th percentile Gates-MacGinitie 63rd percentile Table 8 Sixth grade (12:1 years of age) Below average Low average Average High average Above average 2 15th percentile 16 49th percentile 50th percentile 51 84th percentile 85 98th percentile Receptive English OWLS 16th percentile Expressive English LPT- LPT- Associations 39th percentile Differences 66th percentile Similarities 26th percentile Multiple Meanings 40th percentile Attributes 42nd percentile Total LPT 44th percentile Categorizations 49th percentile Reading Vocabulary ITBS 24th percentile WoodcockRead. Mastery 59th percentile Comprehension WoodcockRead. Mastery 50th percentile ITBS 65th percentile

9 Assessment-Based Language and Reading Instruction 157 Table 9 District curriculum-based assessment (CBA) Grade Year Age 7:1 years 8:1 years 9:1 years 10:1 years 11:1 years 12:1 years Narrative Midyear 80% (SP) 60% (SP) na na SP 100% (SP) End-year 50% (SP) 80% (SP) Specific scores: na 80% (SP) Expository Midyear 37% (FDN) 80% (SP) na na SP 79% (PR) End-year 20% (FDN) 33% (FDN) Specific scores: na 87% (SP) FDN further development needed; SP strong performer; PR progressing reader; na not available. making a more specific sign-gesture. Reminiscent of episodes with Helen Keller before the scene at the water pump, Marcy dutifully imitates the sign, her arms and hands awkwardly moving as a unit rather than as the articulators of words. Copeland, Winsor, and Osborn (1994) explained that typically, children s prior knowledge as speakers of English can be brought to bear as they master its alphabetic system (p. 28). That is, as they learn to speak, children internalize how sounds can be systematically combined to form words. In addition, they learn about semantics and syntax, or how words can be appropriately used linguistically in phrases and sentences. This knowledge is normally acquired in the preschool years (Copeland et al., 1994). In contrast, the majority of deaf children begin to learn to read without linguistic competence (Paul, 1998). That is, they often cannot articulate speech in an intelligible manner, nor can they comprehend and express English. Marcy could not either. In fact, she began school as a profoundly deaf-mute who was alingual. Thus, her situation was not a question of transitioning from Bulgarian to English, but instead of acquiring a first language through accessible social interaction. Slowly but surely, however, Marcy began to learn basic vocabulary and grammar just as a hearing toddler begins to develop spoken language reinforced by the social context and the power of learning to use language to get what she wanted. Adults employed standard language facilitation strategies that included paraphrasing, maintenance of the topic, expansions, building on routines, and so forth, to facilitate Marcy s language development (Luetke-Stahlman, 1998). In ad- dition to receiving daily instruction from a teacher of the deaf, who was trained to intentionally facilitate language and literacy abilities, Marcy received 30 minutes of therapy daily from a speech-language pathologist who was experienced in working with deaf children. In February 1992, having been exposed to English for a month, Marcy s limited language understanding was evident when she described a picture as red language. Her formal signs were frequently interspersed with mime, facial expressions, and gestures, as this is how she communicated before she was adopted. At 4.7 years of age, four months later, Marcy was given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) to try to document her receptive vocabulary knowledge. She scored in the low average range (35th percentile), a score we feel does not accurately portray her struggle to acquire language. Research is available to support our concern. White and Tischer (1999) described possible threats to the construct validity of receptive vocabulary tests such as the PPVT when used to evaluate deaf children. This is because of the prevalence of iconicity of the signs used to encode the vocabulary (p. 338). For example, to ask a child, Where is the picture of a thumb?, the tester points to his or her own thumb when signing the word THUMB. We believe that this factor, as well as the high percentage of nouns included on the first part of the test, enabled Marcy to receive a score that was an inflation of her overall vocabulary ability. Marcy had cochlear implant surgery in May l992, near the end of her first five months of preschool. Twenty-two electrodes were surgically threaded into the cochlea of her right inner ear, which sent an artificial sound signal through the electrodes and eighth

10 158 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 7:2 Spring 2002 nerve to her brain when simulated by a processor worn externally. Marcy wore her cochlear implant equipment daily, and over the course of that first summer, she began to make connections between hearing, speech, and SEE signs. The implant did not allow her to hear normally, however. She had to learn to listen, or, in other words, her brain had to learn to process the sounds stimulating it. In addition, Marcy had to integrate speech sounds with the language she was acquiring. To help develop her simultaneously spoken and signed language ability, Marcy was introduced to many new experiences. Upon her arrival in the United States, Marcy had never experienced a family, a birthday, or a book, or the hundreds of other objects, events, and processes about which stories and informational texts are written. Thus, from the onset, communication and literacy were integrated in her life. She was read to by proficient readers who could sign SEE, she was introduced to books at home, and she frequented the public and school libraries. She also went with her family on many local trips (e.g., zoo, farm, fire station) and family vacations, planned so she could experience such concepts as a mountain and an ocean. Marcy s college-educated parents and three older sisters enjoyed reading, discussing ideas, arguing their point of view, writing for formal and informal reasons, and playing a variety of board games that required language use or reading abilities. Their home was rich with opportunities to value and enjoy literacy. Numerous reading and writing materials were accessible to Marcy, as were two computers. Her grandmother printed frequent letters to her. Videotaped samples document that books were routinely placed in a clear recipe holder on the kitchen table near Marcy. These were usually children s concept books, with pictures and labels grouped by category. Family members would label and discuss these in SEE when there was a lull in the mealtime conversation. The family also routinely corresponded through written messages, such as notes of who was where and a list of needed foods on the refrigerator. Videotapes of signed stories that Marcy enjoyed were each labeled with stickers and printed titles. Two dresser drawers in her room were labeled: school clothes and play clothes so that she could dress more independently. Marcy also was surrounded by some literacy stimulation not common in hearing homes. This was because her deaf sister often used the TDD, a special telephone for the deaf, on which conversation that would be typically heard appeared as printed text across a small screen on the device. Marcy often watched as her sister typed and read on the TDD. In addition, the family used the captioner on their television frequently, which made text visible at the bottom of the screen when anyone spoke during a program. The literacy activities in which Marcy was immersed were reflective of wholelanguage approaches that Stahl (1994) found produced significantly higher literacy achievement at the kindergarten level than did basal reading program approaches. Marcy s engagement in such activities also supported Chall s (1983) notion of stage theory, which says that decoding words is preceded by an awareness of the functions of print and later to an awareness of its form. The Preschool Years Continued: An Orientation to Print and How it Functions Like hearing, preschool-age children of this age, Marcy s attention was focused on the meaning of the collective, ordered stream of words used in conversation, as she watched and responded to requests and comments (Copeland et al., 1994, p. 29). However, the teacher of the deaf also had to plan daily lessons to engage Marcy in activities in which the stream of words was reduced to manageable concepts for her to notice and, therefore, acquire. For example, Marcy learned the meaning of prepositions by following directions to put objects in, on, above, or under other objects. Marcy worked daily with a speech-language pathologist and was able to reliably detect the presence of sound after having worn her cochlear implant for 3 or 4 months. She worked to articulate single phonemes that were highly visible on the mouth, such as /b/. Initially Marcy practiced phonemes in isolation, then in a series (e.g., /b/, /b/, /b/), and later in words (e.g., baa, bee, boo). A videotaped sample filmed at home about this time illustrates how family members helped Marcy acquire these rudiments of communication. In one scene, her older sister is teaching her to say, boo (one of her speech targets) as another sister pretends to

11 Assessment-Based Language and Reading Instruction 159 be surprised. They repeat the game over and over, much to Marcy s delight and benefit, as she practices speech sounds in a meaningful context. Although family members and the speech-language pathologist s purpose was to improve Marcy s speech by helping her realize that sounds are combined to form words, these activities also caused her to manipulate phonemes, which boosted her development of phonemic awareness. The teacher of the deaf facilitated emergent reading skills as well, even though Marcy did not have the awareness of phonology that would be expected of a hearing child her age. She exposed Marcy to elements common in shared reading experiences by demonstrating concepts of print, engaging in life-to-text and textto-life (Cochran-Smith, 1984) connections, and so forth. Sulzby (1985) and others suggest that interactive reading sessions between adult and child facilitate emergent reading development. Through such experiences, children begin to acquire the language of print, mimicking phrases and words from books, and are exposed to word order common in written text but not in conversation. Rare words that are atypical of the informal language used in their everyday lives can also be acquired (Beals, DeTemple, & Dickinson, 1994). Although Marcy s world was rich with language and literacy stimulation, a conversation taken from a family videotape around her fifth birthday documents Marcy s limitations in expressing herself. As cake is eaten, Marcy is seen signing GIRL GOOD with facial expression, as she attempts to converse with another deaf child. Later, when gifts are opened, Marcy signs, HAVE, and a few seconds later, ONE, as if to communicate, I have one of these now. She again uses facial gestures and adds a tilting of her shoulders, but it is unclear what she is trying to communicate with these actions. Marcy produces voiced sounds when she signs each of these utterances, but her words are unintelligible. Due to Marcy s limited communicative ability in this second preschool year, little formal evaluation was conducted. When the PPVT receptive vocabulary test was given again midyear, Marcy scored below average (10th percentile), a score that seemed more valid to her educational team members than her supposed average performance the previous year. Kindergarten: A Focus on Basic, Routine Communication By kindergarten Marcy had adjusted to home life and was participating in literacy experiences. Marcy also saw her sisters, who were as much as 9 years older than she, engaged in a barrage of literacy activities. She was beginning to communicate more with her deaf 7-yearold sister, who had been assessed as signing English as a typical 7-year-old hearing child would speak it (see Table 2). A shoebox of books was now kept in each family car to entertain Marcy on errands, since she could not hear the radio or talk extensively to the driver. Her father built a shelf by her bed, so her reading materials were readily available before bedtime, and a basket was placed in the bathroom to hold additional books and magazines. That Marcy routinely engaged in an independent reading time before going to sleep at night enhanced her preparation for becoming a reader herself (Leslie & Allen, 1999; Mason, 1992; Snow et al., 1998). Marcy enjoyed this quiet time and was aware that other family members were in their beds reading as well. The literacy activities in Marcy s home placed a value on reading, which has been documented to be important in furthering reading achievement. Leslie and Allen (1999) reviewed 30 years of research emphasizing the important role of family members in the literacy development of children. For example, in their study, interest in books and the valuing of literacy were related to children s reading ability. Mason (1992) initially reported that family socioeconomic status (SES) and the availability of print in the home correlated most with reading achievement, but later identified academic guidance, attitude toward education, parent aspirations, and conversations in the home as contributing more directly to early reading achievement and accounted for more variance in reading scores than SES. Marcy s situation reflected the findings of both of these research projects. Although she attended her neighborhood public school, Marcy was not enrolled in kindergarten with hearing children. She did, however, participate in all the nonacademic activities with her hearing peers, such as lunch and recess. Marcy was taught primarily by a

12 160 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 7:2 Spring 2002 teacher of the deaf, who worked with her in a resource room. She also continued to see the speech-language pathologist for a half hour daily. As it had been in preschool, the focus of her day was on the development of basic, routine communication. Her teacher of the deaf read many stories with her and the two of them discussed these at length. If Marcy did not understand the language used in the text, context was added. That is, real objects and pictures were provided and matched to the unfamiliar printed word, examples were given, and links were made to past experiences. For example, her teacher demonstrated and described the word wobbly with a real pair of high heels. Language lessons evolved around story characters and plots, and stories were sometimes chosen because the vocabulary they contained reinforced a language concept being facilitated. Marcy had excellent school attendance in kindergarten and throughout her elementary years. In kindergarten, Marcy improved her basic communication ability. She was no longer mute. She demonstrated in this year her ability to produce most phonemes in the initial position in isolated words; however, when asked to articulate initial, final, and medial phonemes of words included on the Goldman-Fristoe Articulation Test, she could produce only 10%, and all in the initial position. Even with modeling and prompting by a skilled professional, Marcy could not produce the phonemes /g/, /k/, /gn/, and /r/. A listener who was not familiar with deaf speakers could understand about half of what she was trying to say during informal conversation. Marcy s ability to listen to speech and understand it as a form of communication also had improved in the year and a half she had worn her cochlear implant. As is typical when deaf children are being trained to listen, Marcy first learned to detect if sound was present or not, and then began to work on discriminating spoken sounds. In kindergarten, she progressed to being able to tell whether pairs of phonemes were similar or dissimilar. This was practiced in a quiet room with the speech-language pathologist, who blocked her mouth area from view so that Marcy could not speechread. Marcy was asked to listen to utterances such as ba ba ba versus ba ba ba, or ba ba ba versus ta ta ta and to tell whether the series of sounds were the same or different. She also was able to discriminate a loud series from a soft one, a long series from a short one, and one phoneme from another (with 76% accuracy). Marcy could comprehend simple requests and comments auditorially only (without accompanying sign) in routine, context-embedded situations. For example, if she was told, Get your pencil, without signs, in a situation where she would expect a pencil to be needed, she understood what to do. Marcy also practiced listening to a closed set of vocabulary words taken from shared reading text. Her task was to identify which word in a group was being spoken. This was done first while only listening and then, if necessary, while listening and speechreading simultaneously. Each word was used in a sentence after it was correctly identified. The careful articulation of the sounds in words taken from her shared reading work was practiced throughout the day. Finally, Marcy often was asked to imitate the adult model of phrases that appeared in the stories read to her. Both the teacher of the deaf and the speech pathologist integrated sound/letter activities into lessons to facilitate Marcy s knowledge of how specific sounds are linked to print. That Marcy could hear at least something of human speech, as compared to functioning as a profoundly deaf student, was important to her literacy development. Several researchers have discovered that deaf children who can hear at least some sound become better readers (Conrad, 1979; Fabbretti, Volterra, & Pontecorvo, 1998; Geers & Moog, 1989; Paul, 1998). Although Marcy s family and the professionals who worked on her educational team immersed her in accessible language, it was not a surprise that Marcy scored below average on receptive and expressive standardized language tests she was given in preparation for her IEP in the middle of her kindergarten year. Given but 2 years of exposure to accessible language, she functioned linguistically like a hearing 2-year-old. Her score on the PPVT receptive vocabulary word test was well below average (5th percentile). With regard to acquiring decontextualized language, Marcy s development also was delayed. Compared to hearing peers, her score was also below average on the Assessing Semantic Skills Through Everyday Themes (ASSET), also a measure of receptive semantic ability but one that requires the ability

13 Assessment-Based Language and Reading Instruction 161 to comprehend more complex English than the PPVT vocabulary measure. Sample items include Show me the crayons and Show me some things you can string to which the student responds while looking at several pictures (e.g., classroom, kitchen, garage). Marcy s educational team was aware that the comprehension and expression of decontextualized or cognitive-academic language skill (Cummins, 1984) had been found to predict fourth-grade reading comprehension (Tabors, 1996). Therefore, they were encouraged when Marcy scored above the mean in January of her kindergarten year on subtests that measured skills targeted in her IEP and that had been facilitated during the year. Four expressive semantic tests from the Language Processing Test (LPT) targeted such skills in their assessment: Associations (74th percentile), Categorizations (76th percentile), Differences (68th percentile), Similarities (58th percentile). These measures required Marcy to give associations for words such as shoe, pencil, and horse ; give categories (e.g., fruits, farm animals); provide examples; and tell how words like car and bus or sink and bathtub are the same or different. Marcy scored far below her hearing peers on decontextualized expressive semantic language skills that had not been priorities in her program. On the ASSETT test, she could not answer questions such as, What are called? or How does the slide feel? Marcy could not explain the multiple meanings for words such as trip after listening to sentences such as The class is taking a field trip, and Don t trip on the rug, nor could Marcy give attributes of words like pencil and desk categorized along the dimensions of function, components, color, size, shape, category, location, and so on. These were all skills measured by the LPT, a standard tool that measured expressive skills needed in the general classroom. But knowing this information and the importance of these skills in relation to proficient literacy development (Snow et al., 1998), Marcy s education team members set new objectives to help her develop these skills in the coming year. Marcy did not understand either routine or complex English grammar. She could not point to the correct picture when asked to find The boy is sleepy, Where does the boy play baseball? or The boy saw a girl who was carrying a hammer, as required on the Clinical Evaluation of Linguistic Fundamentals (CELF)-Sentence Structure subtest (16th percentile). Neither could she follow simple commands in formal evaluation sessions where routine and context were absent. This was measured by the CELF-Concepts and Directions subtest (9th percentile). Marcy s language was expressed in short, ungrammatical utterances, and an enormous amount of prior knowledge was required by adults to discern her meaning. Videotaped language samples confirm that although Marcy communicated with great joy and enthusiasm, the listener was most often completely stumped by what she was trying to say. Marcy s reading-related abilities were not formally evaluated during her kindergarten year. Although she had not worked specifically on sound-to-letter matching or a sight-word vocabulary as might be common for kindergartners (Snow et. al., 1998), Marcy was an emergent reader, according to the information of stages/phases of reading synthesized by Gunning (1996) from the work of several researchers, including Chall (1983). In this stage, birth to 5 years old, children draw conclusions based on perception and experience (p. 13). Like other emergent readers, Marcy could read environmental print and scribble, and she loved for adults to read to her. Fountas and Pinnell (1996) described this stage as one in which emergent readers gained information about text from pictures and could attend to some features of print. In kindergarten, Marcy demonstrated her acquisition of some phonemic relationships through the speech and language work that was the focus of her school day. Just a few months later as she began first grade, Marcy demonstrated that speech and language activities affected her understanding of phonics and sight words. That is, she used several sound-toprint connections when given Clay s (1993) written dictation task, an assessment that required her to print the phonemic sounds that represented words pronounced by an adult. Obviously, there were many language skills that Marcy s educational team could have chosen to facilitate. They prioritized language and literacy targets by using developmental guidelines, such as the Developmental Language Curriculum (reprinted in Luetke- Stahlman, 1998), Gunning s (1996) synthesis of read-

14 162 Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 7:2 Spring 2002 ing stages, and a district list of research-based literacy accomplishments similar to those of Snow et al. (1998). When adults helped Marcy acquire skills correlated with reading proficiency and mediated conversation around text, they used a method of developing vocabulary and grammar that was an alternative to isolated drill-and-practice tasks. We believe this practice was of paramount importance in allowing Marcy to progress with language and literacy development as she did throughout the elementary years. First Grade: Average Narrative Reading Comprehension Achieved Throughout her first grade year, Marcy again was taught in the resource room by a teacher of the deaf. She and two other deaf children her age worked there on academic curriculum and were integrated with hearing children for lunch, recess, and specials. She did not receive formal social studies, science, or spelling instruction. Few hearing children are afforded the 3:1 teacher-pupil ratio for language arts that Marcy had, but instruction in a resource room and an individualized program are common when students are deaf or identified as language-impaired. Marcy entered first grade ready to learn to read. According to the reading stages compiled by Gunning (1996), she was a beginning reader (see Table 3). Her reading program from first to fifth grade consisted of three specific reading activities: adult-student shared reading, adult-student guided reading using leveled text, and independent student reading (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996). The activities within each of these components were guided by stage theory (Ehri, 1992; Fountas & Pinnell, 1996) and grounded in effective teaching methodology with a strategy focus (Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, Misretta-Hampston, & Echevarria, 1998). Assessment and focused intervention are integral to the effective teaching process, as a teacher must know what skills a student has acquired and which can be aided to emerge subsequently. Students are assisted to progress from dependence to independence with any behavior (Vygosky, 1978). One of the most important jobs of effective instructors is helping students to develop independence and self-evaluation skills (Tierney & Pearson, 1994, p. 515). Marcy was fortunate that her teachers were cognizant of effective teaching strategies, including empowering strategy instruction. Shared reading was a high priority to the teacher of the deaf, who conducted almost daily sessions with Marcy and her two deaf peers. She was cognizant that researchers such as Wells (1985) found that when young children interacted with an adult around narrative and expository text, their language and literacy knowledge improved. Mason (1992) noted that during shared reading, adults can provide an umbrella of explanations, interpretations, and clarifications during teachable moments, because they know the background experiences of their students, as well as what the children know. With this information, teachers can make life-to-text and text-to-life connections (Cochran-Smith, 1984) with students, bridging from what they know to new concepts, vocabulary, and grammatical structures. These elements were characteristic of the shared-reading experiences Marcy enjoyed. Guided-reading sessions occurred individually four or five times a week. Team members decided that just like a hearing at-risk first grader, Marcy would benefit from the instruction of a specially trained reading-intervention teacher. Thus, a deaf educator, trained in the procedures of a reading-intervention program entitled Kansas Accelerated Literacy Learning (KALL) (Nielsen & Glasnapp, 1999), met for 30 minutes a day with Marcy, four to five days a week. KALL procedures are similar to Reading Recovery (Clay, 1993) and guided reading methodology in that lessons consist of three parts: re-reading an independent-level story, word work, and instructional-level reading with teacher support using a variety of wordrecognition strategies. Both narrative and expository books were read, and focused instruction and the development of independence were key elements of the program. Guided-reading instruction is an instructional framework recommended for beginning readers who are hearing, deaf, monolingual, or bilingual (Lally, 1998; Luetke-Stahlman, 1999). Although daily guidedreading activities vary greatly depending on the needs of the students (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996), each 30- minute session involves teacher-student interactions