Developing literacy skills in bilingual deaf children in Los Angeles area
Training experience
The University of Southern California’s Caruso Family Center for Childhood Communication is developing a new program to help children with hearing loss in learning to listen, talk, read and write, reports News-Medical.
The innovative program is called “Come Read with Me” and takes the form of an intensive three-week summer intervention funded as a research project and designed to help develop early literacy skills in oral deaf and hard-of-hearing children from bilingual Spanish-English homes. Of note, Los Angeles has one of the largest Spanish-English bilingual communities in the United States.
Run by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including an educational specialist, an audiologist, a speech-language pathologist, and a biostatistician, the program provides children with daily lessons in shared reading, dialogic reading, writing, and awareness of the sounds of speech. Other topics include work on concepts of print and word knowledge developed through interactions with peers, parents, and teachers.
The program aims to engage parents in the learning process, but also teachers who feel more prepared to help deaf and hard-of-hearing learners. Teachers receive five days of professional development to give them new strategies in teaching phonological awareness, shared reading, and writing, and also have daily coaching and mentoring during the summer sessions. “Teachers are taking this to the classroom and to their peers,” says the program’s educational specialist Debra K. Schrader. “Participants have started sharing their new knowledge with other teachers through professional development at their schools. This is such an effective way to support greater language and literacy acquisition.”
Interested in this project? Watch the video by USC Caruso Family Center for Childhood Communication in Los Angeles:
Source: NHS Choices and University of Southern California’s Caruso Family Center for Childhood Communication
