Reports
Read in Full
Technical Report: Secondary Writing Instruction
Tags: ASL, assessment, bilingual, grammar, itinerant, language delay/deprivation, motivationRead in Full
ResearchCategory:Research Journal Articles
Written language outcomes of deaf elementary students engaged in authentic writing
Tags: efficacy study, fluency/length, grammar, written languageThis study explores the impact of Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) on six students’ written language skills through the application of a multiple-baseline probe single case design with embedded condition. This was part of a larger Institute of Education Sciences (IES)-funded project focused on the development and feasibility of implementation of SIWI. For the majority of skills analyzed, there were improvements in the mean level of performance with the implementation of SIWI, as well as more consistent responding and positive trends in the data. The study also revealed that teachers are in need of additional tools to aid the systematic identification and tracking of syntax skills in children’s written language development, and to distinguish these from other writing skills such as conventions or handwriting.
Read in Full
Research Journal Articles
Beyond the red pen: A functional grammar approach to evaluating the written language of deaf students
Tags: assessment, grammar, written languageDeaf students often differ from their hearing peers in written language development. Providing developmentally appropriate instruction is ideal, yet current methods of writing assessment do not provide teachers with sufficient information regarding the written language (i.e., syntactic) development of deaf students. In this research, we use a Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) approach to language analysis to provide teachers a way to evaluate deaf students’ writing. This project consisted of two studies. The first study focused on whether SFG analysis could be helpful for teachers of the deaf. The second study focused on mapping a trajectory of the written language development of deaf students and the development of written language inventory for teachers of the deaf. This inventory, along with additional evaluation tools, has the potential to impact both objective setting and instruction.
Read in Full
Dissertations
SIWI in an itinerant teaching setting: Contextual factors impacting instruction
Tags: itinerantIn the last 40 years, there has been a shift in where deaf and hard-of-hearing (d/hh) students have been educated (Foster & Cue, 2009), with a majority of d/hh students now spending at least part of their school day in the general education classroom instead of residential or day-schools for the deaf. Many of these students receive specialized support from an itinerant teacher. D/hh children have unique language needs due to their access (or lack thereof) to natural language for acquisition purposes. Insufficient access to language, ASL or English, may be due to: delays in identification and/or amplification, auditory input being partial, and/or the lack of fluent sign language models (Strassman & Schirmer, 2012). D/hh students’ language proficiency has rippling effects, impacting their literacy, both reading and writing, and subsequently all subject areas. With d/hh students needing support for writing, especially given that state standards and national teaching organizations have emphasized the incorporation of writing in content areas (Gabriel & Dostal, 2015), itinerant teachers need to be prepared to provide writing instruction that meets the needs of d/hh students in this teaching context. The purpose of this study was to examine how Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI), a writing framework developed for instruction with d/hh students that is typically modeled in a classroom setting, was implemented by two itinerant teachers and if they found a need to adapt any components of the framework for their context. After analyzing video footage of a full unit of instruction, multiple interviews, and artifacts from each teacher, I found that the itinerant teachers’ instruction was not inherently different from their training. I also found that both teachers addressed their students’ theory of mind needs in different ways, and desired instruction and support in this area. While the participants worked with students using different modes of communication in districts with differing levels of support, both teachers expressed similar context-specific factors that impacted their implementation of SIWI, which were: time, district-specific variables, supporting writing in the general education classroom, and physical space/organization. Based on the findings, recommendations are provided.
Read in Full
Dissertations
Developing a Written Language Inventory for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: A Systemic Functional Grammar Approach
Tags: assessment, grammar, written languageDeaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) students are extremely diverse in language development due to vast differences in residual hearing, response to hearing technologies, and exposure to American Sign Language. Writing is a struggle for these students who have delayed and limited access to English. Studies have found that d/hh students continue to lag behind their hearing peers in syntactic development. Unfortunately, current methods of writing assessment do not provide teachers with sufficient information regarding the syntactic development of d/hh students. This dissertation responds to the need for an assessment that is able to provide this information that is necessary for setting sentence-level objectives and planning developmentally-appropriate instruction.
This project began when I conducted a small pilot study to determine how Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) analysis could impact teachers ability to set instructional objectives. I conducted a SFG analysis to identify the syntactic structures used by a small group (N=26) of d/hh and hearing 3rd-5th graders. The students were divided into low, mid, and high language proficiency groups and a hearing peer group (N=9) was added. I used the findings of the analysis to construct syntactic structure progression charts to guide teachers in SFG analysis, and four teachers field-tested these charts. The study findings indicated that while SFG analysis can provide teachers with insight into their students’ present level of syntactic development and assist them in setting individual objectives, the time requirements associated with SFG analysis make it an unlikely choice for written language assessment.
The purpose of the current study was to construct a written language inventory that could allow teachers to benefit from the advantages of SFG analysis, without requiring extensive time for training and analysis of samples. Using the pilot study findings, I constructed a draft of the written language inventory. The draft was field tested by 8 teachers of d/hh students in a variety of settings, and a second SFG analysis was conducted to examine the syntactic structures used by a larger, more diverse group of students (N=98). Findings were used to make revisions to the structure and content of the written language inventory.
Read in Full
Dissertations
Practices and routines in SIWI lessons that develop skills in reading
Tags: bilingual, word identificationThe average performance of Deaf and hard of hearing (D/hh) students on test of reading comprehension is several grade equivalents below their high school hearing peers. The reading-writing connection is one way to address the literacy challenges of D/hh learners. This study explored that connection in instruction that was driven with a high fidelity to the principles of Strategic Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI). The data for this study came from two grade three classes involved in the second half of a Year II project that was part of a 3-year Institute of Education Sciences-funded project to develop SIWI for use with D/hh students. The video footage of 18 and 31 SIWI lessons spanning two units of instruction in a TC and Bilingual classroom respectively were examined using a comingling of inductive and interpretive analysis and utilizing Spradley’s nine semantic relationships to determine the instructional and learner practices and routines that supported development of word recognition skills. A detailed narrative of the 49 lessons was provided and the following instructional and learner practices and routines were identified: engaging students in cognitively demanding discourse that featured extended discourse and persistence in questioning; a high volume of repeated and wide reading; high volume of writing; multiple representation of words with an emphasis on fingerspelling; and attending to language input. Recommendations made included: adding a high volume of repeated and wide reading as a major pillar of SIWI; informal and standardized reading assessments; individual students should lead the rereading and writing of English sentences; include research as part of planning for writing; and use the back translation approach to signing English text. There is need for further study in the following areas: a comparative analysis of the strategies used in the lowest and highest performing classes; a study that controls for individual practices and routines using multiple regression analysis to determine the variance as predictors of word recognition; an in-depth exploration of recasting; and an analysis of individual student interactions with the practices and routines in the bilingual setting and the relationship of those interactions to gains in word recognition skills.
Read in Full
Dissertations
Developing students’ first language through a second language writing intervention: A simultaneous approach
Tags: ASL, bilingual, written languageDeaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) children often acquire an L1 after age 3, thus are arguably more diverse than that of the general bilingual population. A unique problem therefore exists among d/hh late language learners—they often do not have an L1 to later develop an L2. This study investigated the impact of an English writing intervention (Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction, SIWI) that incorporates support for the development of American Sign Language in an effort to illustrate the necessity of explicitly addressing the proposed interdependence of language learning. The research involved providing 23 upper elementary and middle school d/hh students with SIWI. SIWI has been shown to have a significant impact on student outcomes in language and literacy. The study was conducted in five classrooms—one fourth, two fifth, and two sixth grade classrooms—over a twelve-week period at a state residential school for the deaf. This allowed for two weeks of pre-test, mid-test and post-test administration, five weeks of regular instruction, and five weeks of intervention. The students received SIWI for four forty-five minute sessions and one thirty-minute session each week for a total of five weeks. The intervention replaced their regular 45 minutes of writing instruction. In order to measure expressive language growth in ASL, language samples for each student participant were collected. These samples were analyzed to chart expressive language growth during the time period with no SIWI intervention and while engaged in SIWI by reviewing them for students’ mean length of utterance (MLU), use of unintelligible utterances, and specific grammatical features of ASL, and individually for patterns of ASL expressive language growth. Repeated measures ANOVAs (within and between subjects) conducted for students’ MLU and unintelligible utterances revealed statistically significant growth after five weeks of SIWI. This study demonstrates the reciprocity of language learning. The foregrounding of written English supported the development of a more nuanced understanding of the use and features of ASL.
Read in Full
Practitioner Articles
Technology Tools that Support the Writing Process
Tags: motivation, technologyTechnology—in the form of digital tools incorporated into writing instruction—can help teachers motivate and engage young children, and it may be especially critical for students who do everything they can to avoid writing. Technology may bolster student involvement, foster the engagement of reluctant or struggling writers, and support writing instruction. However, it does even more. A look at the use of technology in two classes shows how technology can create authentic writing opportunities and impact young writers’ choices. Not only do students in these classes engage with their assignment, but they also interact with their audience, explore the purpose of their assignment, and understand their assignment’s impact.
Read in Full
Practitioner Articles
Adapted for deaf students, “Morning Message” helps build writing skills
Tags: apprenticeship, interactiveOne of the greatest challenges teachers of deaf students face is how to teach students to write effectively. Teachers want them to plan, organize, and relay meaning in a coherent way, but teachers also expect them to develop a sense of control over English writing conventions and mechanics. It is probably no surprise that teachers are constantly looking for and testing the kinds of instruction that succeed in teaching these writing skills to students who are deaf or hard of hearing. In this article, the authors discuss an instructional approach, called “Morning Message” by the teachers who use it at Michigan State University, as a guided interactive writing activity. Since the authors learned about Morning Message, they have focused their efforts on adapting this activity to better accommodate the specific needs of students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The authors discuss how Morning Message helps build writing skills and benefits deaf students.
Read in Full
Dissertations
Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI): Apprenticing deaf students in the construction of informative text
Tags: apprenticeship, efficacy study, fluency/length, interactive, language delay/deprivation, linguistic/metalinguistic, revision, strategic, word identification, writing, written languageThe purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of writing instruction that was strategic and interactive, namely Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI), when utilized with deaf, middle school students. In addition to strategic and interactive instruction, four minor instructional components included: (a) use of writing examples and non-examples; (b) metalinguistic knowledge building; (c) use of visual scaffolds; and (d) NIP-it lessons (i.e., contextualized mini-lessons involving Noticing, Instructing, and Practicing). The study used a non-equivalent, pretest-posttest control group design to explore whether students receiving SIWI made significantly greater gains compared to those not receiving SIWI on a number of writing variables and reading. The participants of the study were two teachers of the deaf and their respective middle school students. There were 33 total students, 16 in the treatment group and 17 in the comparison group. Students, teachers and schools were matched according to several pertinent variables. The SIWI intervention lasted a total of 8 weeks, during which the treatment teacher guided the collaborative construction of two informative papers; the comparison group continued with their usual literacy instruction. All students were given a battery of assessments prior to and after the intervention to evaluate any gains. These measures included (a) an informative writing assessment, (b) an editing and revising task, (c) a generalization writing probe similar to a 7th grade state standardized assessment, and (d) a SORT-R reading test. The first three measures were scored, according to rubrics, for organization, coherence, evidence of text structure, contextual language, and conventions. A second rater scored approximately 10 to 20% of the papers and obtained an interrater reliability of 0.93 to 1.0. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was performed along with the necessary follow-up univariate analyses. All analyses were statistically significant, finding SIWI to be an effective instructional approach. Furthermore, the effect sizes (d) or the magnitude of the differences between group means for writing variables were large to very large, ranging from 1.27 to 2.65. The effect size for the reading variable was small to moderate at 0.39.
Read in Full