In order to compare educational strategies from the two lingual forms, the study used signed video tapes using both ASL and English sign. The three students then watched the tapes over a period of two separate sessions, after which they were asked to produce "a written version of the text they had viewed," (Mayer & Akamatsu 2000 p 295). This was then followed up by later interviews comparing and evaluating the two different signed texts they had been exposed to. Study results showed that the three students understood both forms of sign rather similarly, with some slight misunderstandings based on differing contexts between the two. Errors in grammar became the element that showed various distance between the two languages used within the study. One student showed similar mistakes in both, the others showed more grammatical understanding in the English form. The types of mistakes the students made based on language used was also a key factor. This lead researchers to conclude that using both languages helped increase literary understanding overall, especially when used in conjunction with one another, and that mistakes made were often "misunderstanding specific lexical items, not misunderstanding the language as a whole," (Mayer & Akamatsu 2000 p 84). Once again the study could have been stronger by using more participants in a broader sample category. However, the in-depth detail of the study was augmented with the strong design that implemented follow up interviews which were then compared to the actual written data provided by the students themselves.
Finally, Borgna et al. (2010) also aimed to explore how differing approaches to teaching literary strategies could affect overall success for deaf students. This research was much more structured and detailed than the previous studies in that it incorporated four separate experiments in a single study, where information from each one helped the design of the next to further explore questions left open from before. The first study examined the impact of lectures both with and without scaffolding techniques. The second experiment compared scaffolding strategies when they were read independently by students vs. given within a lecture context. The third experiment looked at how scaffolding impacted understanding...
Finally, the fourth experiment examined how students worked within the context of a test situation. Study results showed that students without hearing loss held much more accurate metacognitive judgments in
comparison to deaf students. Additionally, the research showed that deaf students learn equally as well from both
reading and signed lecture instructions. Some of the strengths of this study include the broad sample selection of participants used, with twenty hearing and twenty deaf students being included. Moreover, the fact that deaf students were directly compared to students without hearing loss problems shows strength by allowing the research to clearly show direct differences between the two very different groups. This helps the results from the research apply to assumptions made about a broader category of people in a much larger context.
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References
Borgna, Georgianna; Convertino, Carol; Marschark, Marc; Morrison, Carolyn; & Rizzolo, Kathleen. (2010). Enhancing deaf students'
learning from
sign language and text: Metacognition, modality, and the effectiveness of content scaffolding. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 16(1), 79-101.
Hoffman, Mary & Wang, Ye. (2010). The use of graphic representations of sign language in leveled texts to support deaf readers. American Annals of the Deaf, 155(2), 131-138.
Mayer, Connie & Akamatsu, C. Tane. (2000). Deaf
children creating written texts: Contributions of American sign language gauge and signed forms of English. American Annals of the Deaf, 145(5), 294-405.
Mueller, Vanessa & Hurtig, Richard. (2009). Technology-enhanced shared reading with deaf and hard-of-hearing children: The role of a fluent signing narrator. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 15(1), 72-102.
Reitsma, Pieter. (2009). Computer-based exercises for learning to read and spell by deaf…
