Practices and Routines in SIWI Lessons that Develop Skills in Reading

The 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.