Teaching Reading to Children Who Are Deaf: Do the Conclusions of the National Reading Panel Apply?

The authors conducted a synthetic review of the research literature on the reading development and reading instruction of deaf students and compared their findings to the review of research literature conducted by the National Reading Panel (NRP) on four topic areas: (a) alphabetics (phonemic awareness instruction and phonics instruction); (b) fluency; (c) comprehension (vocabulary instruction and text comprehension instruction); and (d) computer technology and reading instruction. In their discussion of the areas of overlap in the two bodies of research and of the implications for future research, the authors note the lack of research with deaf readers on instructional interventions that have been found to be effective with hearing readers and on the implications for isolation from mainstream reading research.