Early literacy of kindergartners with hearing impairment: the role of mother-child collaborative writing.(Report)

The study examined the context of early literacy development among kindergartners with hearing impairment (HI), focusing on the role of mother-child collaborative writing. Success in acquiring literacy skills offers one of the central keys to scholastic achievement. Yet for many children with HI, reading and writing pose great difficulty (e.g., Howell & Luckner, 2003; Musselman, 2000), and progress in the literacy domain is extremely slow (Harris & Beech, 1998; Kyle & Harris, 2005; Marschark & Harris, 1996).

Studies of reading acquisition in children with HI have reported that their language skills, phonological awareness, and language comprehension in kindergarten predicted reading progress in first grade (Colin, Magnan, Ecalle, & Leybaert, 2004; Harris & Beech, 1998). The evidence regarding continuity in literacy achievements invites research to tease apart possible sources of these differences in early literacy among young children with HI.

Reading tasks require the same acquisition of skills whether a child is hearing or deaf (Luetke-Stahlman & Nielsen, 2003). Research on hearing children that has examined the issue of continuity in the transition from kindergarten to school has emphasized the role of alphabetic skills and phonological awareness in kindergarten as chief predictors of decoding accuracy, reading fluency, and reading comprehension at the beginning of school (e.g., Badian, 2001; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Shanahan, 2001; Stern & Goswami, 2000). Compared with the wide volume of studies on hearing children's early literacy development, only a few investigators have described the development of early literacy in young children with HI (Williams, 2004). Nevertheless, some data have indicated that beyond the language delay, which is a hallmark of hearing loss (Musselman, 2000), kindergartners with HI lag behind in alphabetic skills, such as letter naming, word identification, and word writing (e.g., Mayer, 2007; Most, Aram, & Andorn, 2006), as well as in phonological awareness (e.g., Allman, 2002, Colin et al., 2004) relative to their hearing peers.

Williams (2004) reviewed the literature on early literacy in children with HI and concluded that their literacy development comprises a naturally emerging process that can parallel that of hearing children, given supportive literacy environments. However, researchers have asserted that children with HI experience less exposure than hearing children to such adult-child literacy-related interactions prior to entering school (Luetke-Stahlman, 1999; Marschark, 1993; Williams, 1994).

Observations in homes of young hearing children revealed that children are engaged in writing interactions with their parents. They pretend to write in their parents' presence, watch their parents write and ask them about what they wrote, write invitations or notes together, and so on (e.g., Baker, Fernandez-Fein, Scher, & Williams, 1998; Bissex, 1980; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984). Some studies found that parent-child writing interactions are productive in predicting early literacy and later literacy achievements. DeBaryshe, Buell, and Binder (1996) observed 30 kindergartners writing a letter to someone, both alone and with their mother's assistance. They found associations between maternal scaffolding behaviors during the writing interaction and their children's writing skills and understanding of writing conventions. Aram and Levin (2001) videotaped 40 mothers and their kindergartners at home while performing writing tasks. Analysis of the interactions revealed that the quality of maternal writing mediation predicted kindergartners' early literacy (word writing, word recognition, and phonological awareness) even after controlling for socio-cultural measures (socioeconomic status [SES], maternal literacy, home literacy environment). A follow-up study (Aram & Levin, 2004) assessing the participants 2.5 years later found that the earlier measure of maternal writing mediation in kindergarten predicted these second graders' spelling, reading comprehension, and language beyond SES and their early literacy measures assessed in kindergarten. In the same manner, Senechal, LeFevre, Thomas, and Daley (1998) found that the amount of parent-child writing interactions was related to kindergartners' (N = 110) early literacy (concepts about book reading, alphabet knowledge, early reading, and invented spelling) and predicted their word reading achievements at the end of first grade (N = 47).

To the best of our knowledge, no study has yet explored the relations between parent-child writing interactions and early literacy among young children with HI. There are, though, a few descriptive studies that have examined the early writing experiences of young children with HI at home with their parents. Ruiz (1995) followed her own deaf daughter's early writing development. She analyzed Elena's drawing and writing papers created in the home from ages 3 to 7 years. Elena experienced writing frequently at home, and Ruiz found that many of Elena's hypotheses about English orthography were similar to those of hearing children. For example, Elena's name was her first known word or "stable string." Also, like hearing children, she demonstrated her understanding that there should be correspondence between the size of the referent and the written word, and she presented smaller objects with fewer letters than a larger object. Williams (1994) followed three profoundly deaf children (ages 3.11 to 5.10) for 6 months within their kindergarten classrooms and in their homes. She documented the early literacy activities in each context. Williams indicated that the children were immersed in literacy activities both in their homes (supported by their parents) and at school (supported by their teachers). They engaged in drawing and writing activities on a regular basis. Her results indicated that the children learned to use written language as a primary form of communication. When they faced difficulties expressing themselves, they used drawing and writing to communicate with both peers and adults. Studies that followed the writing development of children with HI in educational settings demonstrated that their movement through developmental steps in spelling paralleled that of hearing students (Mayer & Moskos, 1998; Williams, 2004).

The aim of the current study is to examine the unique contribution of the mother's writing mediation nature to her child's early literacy skills while controlling for the child's age and degree of hearing loss and for the mother's educational level. The nature of joint writing as a challenging literacy task reflects cognitive and emotional mediation characteristics. The cognitive ones (e.g., teaching the child how to retrieve a letter by name) contain a proximity to the basic skills of letter knowledge and grapheme-phoneme mapping (Aram, 2002), and the emotional ones (e.g., creating a warm atmosphere) are more communicational in their nature and are also prevalent in other parent-child task-oriented interactions (e.g., Gonzalez, 1996). As to children's early literacy skills, studies of parent-child literacy interactions have typically associated the quantity and the quality of the interactions with a variety of language and alphabetic skills measurements (for a review, see Scarborough & Dobrich, 1994). In the present study, it was expected that maternal mediation measures would be related to all children's early literacy skills (alphabetic skills and language measures). Furthermore, it was expected that cognitive aspects of the mediation would contribute to the basic alphabetic skills measures and emotional ones would contribute to all the early literacy measures (alphabetic skill and language measures), over and above the contribution of the child's age and degree of hearing loss and of the mother's educational level.

Method

Participants

The sample consisted of 30 kindergartners with prelingual HI (14 boys and 16 girls) and their mothers with normal heating. They were recruited from the Tel Aviv branch of the MICHA Society for Deaf Children, a national early intervention agency that provides educational and rehabilitation services to young children (ages 0-7 years) with HI and to their families. Ages of the children in this study ranged from 62 to 84 months (M = 72, SD = 7.6). The sample included all the children with HI who, at the time of the study, were living in central Israel (about half of all the Israeli kindergartners with HI) and who met the following criteria: The child with HI was about to start first grade in the following school year, had hearing parents, and had no …