A bedtime storybook reading intervention with deaf children

Although it has been found that young deaf children's patterns of emergent literacy can parallel those of hearing children, deaf children's emergent literacy development and conventional reading abilities are often delayed when compared to hearing children. Storybook reading by adults is an empirically supported method for fostering hearing children's literacy development. In this study, storybook reading was investigated as an intervention technique with deaf children. Subjects were 9 experimental and 9 control children aged 4 to 11 who lived in randomly selected residential cottages at a state-sponsored school for the deaf. Experimental subjects and their peers participated in 30-minute bedtime storybook reading sessions twice a week for five months. Deaf high school students and residential counselors signed books to the children. The control subjects did not receive any treatment other than the availability of books that were rotated bi-weekly among the experimental and control cottages. Pre- and post-test measures involved a reading task, based on Sulzby's interview technique and her developmental sequence model, and teacher and counselor questionnaires. Process measures included observational documentation of all the storybook reading sessions and of the cottages' literacy environments. Results showed that children were highly engaged during the storybook readings. When readers employed interactive and/or expressive reading styles, children were significantly more engaged than when readers were unexpressive. Significant differences were found between groups on the two post-test measures of independence and the final administration of the counselor questionnaires, with the experimental children showing more independence and more interest in books. Themes emerging from observers' narrative data taken during the storybook readings were: Some children enjoyed taking on the role of reader; counselor presence enhanced children's ability to become involved in the stories; children and counselors had most and least favorite books; and children became tired at the end of the storybook readings. Unique contributions include the development of two ways of measuring independence and the extension of Sulzby's procedure to deaf children. In addition, the observers' quantitative and narrative data provided descriptions of the storybook reading sessions with detail and rigor not presented in previous research.