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BEVERLY TREZEK: Welcome back.
We're about halfway through our lecture series at this point
of "Paving The Path From Language To Literacy For Young Deaf Learners."
I'm Beverley Trezek from DePaul University
in Chicago in the United States.
CONNIE MAYER: And I'm Connie Mayer from York University in Toronto, Canada.
BEVERLY: So we just wanted to kind of start and give a little bit
of where have we been and where are we going for the rest of our series.
So in the first couple of lectures,
we talked about the foundational requisites for literacy learning,
we talked about the importance of access for deaf children,
and then we moved into the early years, from birth to about age three,
and we talked a little bit more in depth
about what children are doing at that time period
and how we can develop those skills,
so what were the developmental milestones
and what were the practices to support those milestones?
Today we're going to move forward a little bit,
going into the pre-school years.
So we'll be focusing on children from the ages of around three to five,
again, keeping in mind that it's a fairly flexible path along the way.
CONNIE: And in this presentation, the learning objectives include,
to identify the developmental literacy milestones for this next age group
from children ages three to five.
BEVERLY: We'll be talking more in depth about how children are making sense
of the relationship between language and text.
CONNIE: And then to consider the impact of hearing loss on this process.
BEVERLY: We'll also be defining some terms and differentiating some terms,
such as phonological sensitivity,
phonological awareness and phonemic awareness.
There are important distinctions that need to be made around these skills.
CONNIE: And then we'll also be looking at the characteristics of writing
that develop at this stage when children are getting more control of the pencil.
BEVERLY: We've been using this model, this arrow,
and just giving a nod to coming back to this graphic
and reminding us where we've been and where we're going again.
So our first lectures were focusing on those first steps, zero to three.
We're now what we're calling our next steps,
that three to five-year-old range.
And then in our next lectures, we'll be talking about students
in the four to six-year-old range.
CONNIE: And the focus for this presentation
is the 37 to 48-month-old child.
And at this point, both reading and writing are addressed
because children do now have that dexterity
where writing can take as much of a role as reading in development.
BEVERLY: Again, as in all the stages that we've been talking about,
skills build upon one another in a hierarchical fashion.
CONNIE: And also, we always want to underscore,
particularly because we're the reading people and the writing people,
that both reading and writing need to be given equal emphasis
right from the get-go and in the early years.
The emphasis at this stage is really on how children come to make sense
of different representation systems for making meaning.
So in other words, you make meaning in a number of ways.
A huge one in a child's world is through spoken language,
but they also make meaning through drawing,
and they make meaning through print, reading and writing.
And one of the markers at this stage is how children come to connect those,
how meaning is made in those different representation systems
and how they work together to be mutually supportive.
BEVERLY: And just to remind you of what children are doing at this stage,
we want you to watch a clip, and this is a child who's nearly three.
And we just want you to watch the clip
and then we'll highlight some of the things that we see happening here.
CHILD: Grandma want some food.
Grandma want some food.
GRANDMOTHER: Thank you.
Could I have some food, please?
Thank you.
Yum, yum.
CHILD: You wanna make it first.
GRANDMOTHER: Yes, can I have mustard on my hot dog, please?
CHILD: You make it.
GRANDMOTHER: OK.
Are you making it?
OK.
CHILD: You want some French fries, too?
GRANDMA: Thank you.
How much would that be?
CHILD: Erm...
$5.
GRANDMOTHER: $5?
OK.
Here's your $5.
OK.
Thank you.
Can I have a drink too, please?
CHILD: OK.
Choc milk.
GRANDMOTHER: OK.
Thank you for the chocolate milk.
How much is the chocolate milk?
CHILD: There!
GRANDMOTHER: Thank you very much.
Do you have other customers?
CHILD: No, no customers.
GRANDMOTHER: No other customers?
BEVERLY: I think this was an excellent example of a child
that's using language for communicating with others.
You saw him in his little toy...
CONNIE: It was a hot dog truck.
BEVERLY: A hot dog truck.
And he's asking his grandmother what does she want to eat,
"Grandma, what do you want?
Do you want French fries?"
He's using it as an exchange back and forth through play,
but it's really communicating.
CONNIE: Exactly, and it's a nice example we talked about in previous sessions
that this is not a lesson, it's not particularly structured,
but grandma is scaffolding language for this little young boy
and he's enjoying this interaction.
And you can notice how,
as we spoke about in one of our earlier presentations,
he really has control of most of the language fundamentals
to engage in this conversation with others.
BEVERLY: One of the things we like to point out when we look at this video
is how he's referencing himself.
It can be a little confusing if you don't know the child,
but he's saying "you."
He's referencing "you" for both himself as well as grandmother.
So when he's saying, "You need to make it,"
he's really saying, "I need to make it."
But then, "You want French fries?"
So it can be a little confusing, but if you know the child
and you know how his language is developing,
it's clear that he's calling himself "you."
CONNIE: And in the next clip that we want to show you,
it's the same little boy a little bit later,
and the reason we've chosen to show you this clip
is to really to illustrate something
that we don't have a lot of time to talk about
in this set of presentations, but that's critically important,
and that's that link between language and thinking, or language and cognition.
So in this clip, what you're going to watch is the same little boy
at about age three exactly and he's playing with his dump truck.
And while he's playing with his dump truck, he's talking,
but he's not talking to anyone, he's talking to himself as he plays.
CHILD: That's big.
Super good.
That's big.
Super good.
That's big, too.
It's good.
Super good.
In the dump truck back.
You put rocks in the dump truck.
Can you put rocks and fit them in the dump truck?
Look!
The dump truck is really full.
He's really full.
He's very full.
He very full.
TRUCK: "Caterpillar!"
(REVERSING ALARM)
CHILD: Beep, beep!
Out of the way!
Beep, beep!
Out of the way!
Oh, no, no, no!
Beep, beep, beep!
He dumped!
He dumped!
Now he go back for another one!
CONNIE: What you probably noticed was
the entire time that he's driving his dump truck around,
he is overlaying spoken language on top of his activity.
And interestingly, Piaget used to think that this activity,
when children over-talked while they were playing,
was a way of practising speech.
In fact, Vgotsky's insight was that this was actually thinking out loud,
that what's happening here is that this little boy
isn't communicating with anybody, he's not practising talking,
he's really thinking aloud.
So as he's playing,
he's really giving you a sense of what's going on in his head
as he drives the dump truck around,
saying things like, "Super good."
"That's big."
"Put rocks in the dump truck."
"Can you put rocks in and fit them in the dump truck?"
"Look!
It's really, really full.
It's very full."
So he's describing the activity while he's doing it
and you're getting an insight into his thinking.
And while we don't have a lot of time to go down this discussion road
in this set of presentations,
it marks or points you to the fact that
this isn't just language for communication with others
that's important for literacy development,
it's the ability to use language to think with,
because when you're doing reading and writing activities,
you need to be able to think about things inter-mentally,
in your head, with language, so that you can read and so that you can write.
The research findings in this area for deaf children,
and this is where the challenge comes in that we've been talking about before,
often deaf children don't have control of that language
for communication with others, and communication with self, thinking,
and so they struggle.
In the research findings from Nicholas, 2000,
he talks about the fact that in a 30-minute play session with parents,
a typical three-and-a-half-year-old hearing child
produces about 210 different words,
with an average length of utterance of about 3.2 words.
Where in contrast, three-year-old profoundly deaf children
without implants had only about 35 different words,
with an average length of utterance of 1.5 words.
The reason that we put this here is not to be dismal,
but to say that if you want to move on to next steps along our little arrow,
if you haven't got that language foundation in place,
it's not possible to move to the next steps without it.
BEVERLY: And I think a quote from Nicholas and Geers, 2006,
really captures this when they say,
"This low level of lexical and grammatical proficiency
put them at a huge disadvantage compared to chronologic age-mates
and left them unable to fully participate in,
and benefit from, typical pre-school activities
without a high degree of communicative support."
So I think that goes back to what we were talking about
in our previous lectures about having to provide that support,
provide differentiated instruction,
and I think that that quote there really supports what we've been saying.
CONNIE: We just really want to emphasise this fact that
without the language as a foundation for literacy,
some of the things we're going to say
from here on out to the end of these set of presentations
are going to fall short if the child does not have the language
that's going to hold up the literacy, even in these early years.
BEVERLY: So if we move on now and we're going to talk about
what are these next steps, what are the next steps in reading?
We'll start with reading.
In this age period, from three to five,
children are still gaining quite a bit of knowledge from being read to.
They're able to read familiar stories from memory.
And we saw clips of that before,
we saw the little girl reading, "Brown bear, brown bear what do you see?"
She was about three, so she was at this kind of starting point here.
They're able to retell simple stories in sequence.
So if you ask them to retell a story,
the Gruffalo, that they've heard many times,
they'll be able to retell that story to you.
They imitate adult reading behaviour.
So certainly with their book handling,
pointing at words while they're reading,
things that parents have modelled for them,
or caregivers have modelled for them.
CONNIE: And it's at this stage when children have had this opportunity
to interact a lot with books, this gaining knowledge from being read to,
you can read about things that you don't directly experience.
So of course the child is going to understand
about the things going on in their own world,
but books take them into a world that they might not be experiencing directly.
So that children who are read to are gaining not only just the language,
but the world knowledge about a world
that's bigger than the life they're living.
BEVERLY: And if you think about some of the types of books
that we read with young children,
there's always a lot of rhyme and alliteration included in those books.
So they're really beginning to attend to the sound structures of the language,
the initial sounds of words, the end sound of words.
We talked in a previous lecture
about how children can start to fill in those rhyming words
because they have heard the story many times.
So they're gaining that sense about the sound structure of the language.
They're also able to recognise some basic sight words.
So you can have them point out words while you're reading with them,
"Can you find the word "in"?
Can you find a word that begins with M?"
things such as that.
They're just increasing their curiosity
about letters and sounds and print itself.
CONNIE: And as we spoke in an earlier presentation,
the books that we read to children at this age
often have that rhyme, alliteration,
they take advantage of that playing with sound
because children enjoy hearing it.
But as well now, as children get a little bit older,
we expand that into books that maybe aren't always just those types of books,
so books that have a bit more complex stories,
that might even get into expository text
where children are learning about things that are new to them,
animals, dinosaurs, things like that,
that might not be those pattern books or those rhyming stories.
BEVERLY: And towards the end of this phase of development,
so when children are around the age of five,
you really see them even begin to evidence some ability
to decode some simple words and sound them out, if you will.
And so there's a strong focus at this stage
on the development of phonological sensitivity.
And in thinking about phonological sensitivity,
we've talked about this a lot.
CONNIE: We debated whether to talk about this in the presentation.
BEVERLY: Yeah, it's complex and it's a bit confusing,
but I think it's a really important aspect
of the development of phonological processing.
CONNIE: And you can make yourself look really clever when you say,
"lexical restructuring hypothesis" in the next conversation that comes up.
BEVERLY: Because I'm sure it will.
But this is an idea, a hypothesis,
around how children store words and retrieve words and use words.
CONNIE: If you think about it for a second,
how is it you're remembering those words,
how is it you're holding them in your head?
They're coming at you, we've talked about that, you're surrounded by words,
but how are you hanging onto them at this age in increasing numbers?
BEVERLY: And initially when children are up to around the age of two, three,
they're storing words as whole units,
and really it becomes almost...
we have that vocabulary burst at this age,
and you can no longer in your memory hold these words as large chunks.
And so, as Lonigan would suggest, that during these pre-school years
your lexical representations, or your representations of words,
need to become more fine-grained and segmented
in order for you to be able to remember them.
CONNIE: So in other words, how are you holding those words in your head
becomes more fine-tuned, because Beverley mentioned vocabulary bursts.
We know that children, in language acquisition,
the first bit is very much receptive.
You understand many more words than you can produce.
But at around, again, depending on whose research you look at,
but somewhere after 18 months to two years, two and a half years,
children, they call it a burst, an explosion,
all of a sudden, children take on board,
rather than just a couple of words a week,
words and words every day, every month.
The best way to explain it is to think about how parents keep those baby books.
And when your child is first born, you can keep track,
and they can say this word and they can say "mummy" and they can say "cookie."
And then all of a sudden, the parent realises, "I can't keep track any more,"
because there's too many words in this child's world.
That's when the vocabulary burst has happened.
And when we need to worry for deaf children
is when that burst doesn't happen.
And in fact, the research has shown that sometimes deaf children will flatline.
They do continue to learn new words,
but not at that pace that we should be seeing.
BEVERLY: So as Connie was saying, this growth, it's just exponential.
It just is this burst of vocabulary
that's coming at children at that time.
So in order to be able to recall, store these words,
they have to start to look at how words are similar and how they are different.
And I think the best way to talk about this is to use examples.
So at this age, children around the age of three
would be able to know and distinguish
the difference between words such as "man," "pan" and "fan."
They know those words, they can distinguish the difference between them,
even though they only differ by one phoneme, the initial phoneme.
CONNIE: Don't get this confused with print.
There's no print attached to this.
They're not separating this out because they see different letters.
This is all auditory.
So if you again think about
the implications for children with hearing loss,
they might have more challenges here
because it's harder for them to hear those distinctions,
which might interfere with their vocabulary development.
BEVERLY: Another example, words such as "cat," "can" and "cap."
Children at this age can distinguish the difference between those words.
They have different meaning, they sound different
and they only differ by the final phoneme.
And then our final example, such as "pat," "pet" and "pot,"
they can distinguish the difference between those words
that only differ by the medial phoneme.
So what this suggests is,
in order for children to be able to hold that information,
hold these words in their lexicon, or their mental dictionary,
they have to be able to distinguish the words by smaller and smaller pieces.
And this is the beginning of the development of phonological sensitivity.
And it's also a reason why,
as we start to talk about some of the phonological skills in our next lecture,
is why children who have smaller vocabularies
often struggle with these phonological skills.
Because if you have a smaller vocabulary,
there's less demand on your lexicon
to be able to have to get down to these fine-grained,
phoneme by phoneme representations.
So a couple of other skills
that are related to this idea of early vocabulary building
and the development of phonological processing
are two additional areas.
Phonological access to lexical store.
So this is a fancy way of saying
how quickly can you retrieve things from your permanent memory?
So how we usually assess this in young children
is their ability to name things quickly, Rapid Automatic Naming, or RAN.
CONNIE: And if you do assessments on children of this age and older,
it's usually almost part of every standardised test,
rapid automatic naming.
Can you name these objects quickly?
BEVERLY: Objects and colours are often what we start with
with children of this age,
because they, particularly colours, they know them,
and how quickly can they name them when they're presented before them?
Another aspect of this skill set is phonological memory.
And this is ability to remember phonological information
for a short amount of time.
So this is where if I say something to you,
can you repeat it back to me?
And why that's so important, if you think about what's happening
with reading comprehension later down the line, that's what you need to do.
You need to be able to hold information in your head
from the beginning of the sentence to the end of the sentence
to be able to understand it.
So those are two skills in addition to this lexical restructuring hypothesis
that are coming into play at this time.
CONNIE: And if you think about what you need to do when you write,
it's kind of the flip side of reading.
If I want to write something, I have to hold it in my head, that sentence,
and be able to say it to myself so that I can get it down on paper.
So this notion of auditory memory is critical.
And it doesn't take a big leap of thinking
to realise that a child with hearing loss
may face particular challenges around auditory memory
that can impact literacy development.
BEVERLY: So where we're going to pick up in our next lecture
is talking more specifically about the skills
that fall under this umbrella of phonological sensitivity.