Promoting deaf children’s literacy and numeracy skills

Oxford University are undertaking a three-year research project to promote and develop deaf children’s literacy and numeracy skills. 

The project will focus on deaf children aged seven to 11-years-old with a moderate to profound hearing loss, regardless of amplification used, communication mode or type of school attended.

The three-year project aims to:

• develop and maintain a web portal which will be linked to the NCDS website and will provide information for parents and teachers on research about new approaches to deaf children’s education;
• develop educational games that children can use through this portal and collect information on their use throughout the project;
• develop new ways of family-school working in order to support deaf children’s literacy and numeracy learning, with a focus on the activities made available to them through the portal.
  
  

Stage One

The first stage of this project will begin in September 2008 and will run for one year. 

The research team will:

• design literacy materials to be used by children and parents, in partnership with teachers and schools, and monitor their success when used in this way;
• develop a website to provide information about research and new approaches to teaching deaf children.

Teachers will deliver a programme of literacy activities through a set of resources developed by the research team. Parents will continue this programme at home with similar literacy activities.

Some activities will be web-based and some will be books and board games, though children with no access to the internet at home can still participate at school.

Teachers will evaluate and report on the activities undertaken at school and parents will monitor the activities at home by completing a short, tick-box questionnaire.

The literacy activities will be based around teaching deaf children to identify morphemes in words rather than relying on phonetics. Morphemes are basic units of meaning, for example, the word ‘magician’ has two morphemes: ‘magic’, which is the stem, and the suffix ‘ian’, which forms ‘person words’. Phonetics concerns the sounds of words.

This will help deaf children develop and use their morphological skills more efficiently in reading and spelling, and also has a positive and significant impact on their reading comprehension and writing skills.

Written language represents spoken language, and learning written language with limited knowledge of the spoken language that it represents is challenging. Letters represent the sounds of words and so learning English literacy is a great challenge for severely and profoundly deaf pupils, who do not have the range of experiences with sounds that is necessary for using letter-sound correspondences accurately.


Stage Two

The second stage of this project will begin in September 2009 and will run for two years. The research team will:

• publicise the portal and promote its use;
• look into the use and effectiveness of the activities developed in year one;
• develop numeracy games (second project year) and working memory games (third project year) for independent use by the children. These will be added to the portal.
  
  

If you are interested in further information about the project or would be interested in your child participating in this research project please contact:

Dr Diana Burman 
Dept of Education
University of Oxford
15 Norham Gardens
Oxford
OX2 6PY

Email: diana.burman@education.ox.ac.uk 
Tel: 01865 284 893