Learning from Deaf Children’s Visual Literacy Events –
Implications for the teaching of hearing children

Carin Roos

Abstract

The aim of the study (Roos, 2004, Doctoral Dissertation) reported here was to focus on the literacy events going on, in a preschool and during the first year in school for the Deaf, from the children’s perspective. The study was a study of a group of deaf children during a two-year period. The study is ethnographic.

The results of the study showed that deaf children developed their interest in reading and writing during the first preschool years in much the same way as hearing children do. They showed an increasing meta linguistic awareness and an understanding of the function of written texts. The results show that the children used several kinds of strategies in learning to read and write. Some of these strategies was regarding how to decode and remember words and some had to do with the fact that the children are visual oriented, seeing and not hearing. Results will be presented in the paper suggesting that we could learn from the deaf children’s strategies when working with hearing with reading and writing difficulties.