This breakthrough now demands attention regarding reading instruction considerations, as deaf students continue to struggle in gaining English literacy skills. In response, a charter school was established in Tucson, Arizona in 1997 and this school enjoyed a formal research and development affiliation with The University of Arizona, led by Dr. Sam Supalla’s efforts.
These efforts focused on how we can best teaching reading to deaf students by breaking down any restrictions. This is how ASL Gloss™ came into existence and allowed for building the literacy curriculum from the ground up. Dr. Supalla and his collaborators continued gaining experience from training and working with educators in three schools for deaf children in Canada. The Canadian exploration into ASL Gloss™ as well as the Arizona charter school’s research and development efforts were critical for recognizing the reality of effective learning experiences for deaf students. The creation of a normatively rare database for ASL Gloss™ represents the next step in validating deaf students’ progress with literacy skills.
By all accounts, deaf students need to make yearly progress with reading skills and deserve a better and improved experience in learning English literacy. While conventional reading instruction practices include teaching phonetic skills for all students, the question for deaf education is how to incorporate this? Deaf students do not hear English words or think in words, and that becomes problematic for the development of word decoding skills. The good news is that the GI Literacy Curriculum has an answer to this dilemma.
One component of ASL Gloss™ known as the ASL-phabet can be accessed by deaf students to enhance their reading experience. This can now be done on paper, and this allows deaf students to demonstrate sign language phonetic skills that are teachable and measurable. The practicality of the ASL-phabet includes deaf students’ ability to use a bilingual dictionary with the paired listing of written signs and their English equivalents, thus helping deaf students understand the meaning of English words through translation.
Supporting the rationale of ASL Gloss™, researchers confirmed the restrictive nature of English phonology as follows:
