BASIC PREPARATION IN READING AND WRITING ENGLISH

It is a common perception that deaf and hard of hearing students compensate for their hearing losses through their vision. Indeed this is so in some areas, illustrated by the use of sign language and lipreading, but this does not ipso facto lead to their becoming superior readers and writers of English. In fact, most students with early onsets of deafness continue to struggle with English throughout their adult lives. Their situation is somewhat analogous to that of a foreign student who has grown up immersed in another language and another culture, and who as a college student, must make a concerted effort to learn a new vocabulary and very different grammatical structures (Charrow & Fletcher, 1975; Charrow & Wilbur, 1989). In fact, a college instructor might have difficulty distinguishing between the writing samples of many deaf students and international students for whom English is a second language.

Although the rate of high school graduation among deaf students has improved over the past several decades, the majority of these students continue to leave high school with reading levels at the fifth grade reading level or below. Most hard of hearing students graduate with higher reading levels than their deaf peers because they have greater access to the auditory reception of linguistic information. However, for the same reason, their reading levels are likely to be lower than those of their normally hearing peers, i.e., their hearing losses may not enable them to receive and process auditory information at full efficiency, even with sophisticated personal hearing aids and other assistive listening devices.

Moreover, because of their isolation from the plethora of incidental learning experiences that other students acquire daily and effortlessly by reason of their hearing, deaf and hard of hearing students may have an uneven conceptual context in which to place their reading and writing. In any event, these difficulties are likely to lead to problems in all academic areas that rely heavily on these language skills, and make graduation unlikely without remediation.

Characteristics and backgrounds of students. As stated repeatedly throughout this and other reports, the backgrounds and academic levels of deaf and hard of hearing students entering postsecondary institutions vary considerably from one to another. This includes their skills in reading and writing English.

All service-delivery models of postsecondary education for deaf and hard of hearing students will need to address standards relevant to literacy competencies with regard to students' entering, continuing, and exit criteria. Such standards are likely to vary as a function of the variety of postsecondary institutions attended today by these students.

Crucial to this matter is the necessity to prepare deaf and hard of hearing students, like all students, for today's work environments and the part played by skills in reading and writing. At the same time, we need to maintain respect for the repertoire of linguistic abilities and preferences each student brings to the college environment.

Many deaf and hard of hearing students will have no need for special help in developing their reading and writing skills beyond what is offered to all students as part of the regular college curriculum. However, others will have this need, calling for the development of a plan for basic or remedial academic preparation in English at the postsecondary level.

Before such a plan is developed, information about the student's communication history and academic goals should be obtained, much of which can be provided by the student him/herself. Among the most relevant questions are the following:

• What has the student's primary language or modality for instruction been up until now? If the student is hard of hearing, it is likely to be English in its spoken/auditory form, augmented by a personal hearing aid and perhaps an assistive listening device for classroom use. If the student is deaf, it may be ASL (American Sign Language) as used by native or near-native signers, signed English accompanied by spoken English, or oral (depending on a combination of speech and speechreading, usually augmented by the use of a personal hearing aid, assistive listening device, or increasingly today, by a cochlear implant device). "Cued Speech" is yet another variant on the simultaneous use of speech and signs used for communication by some deaf students today.