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Early Literacy of Kindergartners With Hearing Impairment: The Role of Mother-Child Collaborative Writing
Dorit Aram, Tova Most, Adi Ben Simon. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education. Austin: May 2008. Vol. 28, Iss. 1; pg. 31, 11 pgs
Abstract (Summary)
The study assessed the value of maternal writing mediation in predicting children's early literacy. Thirty kindergartners with hearingimpairment (HI) and their mothers participated. Mothers were videotaped at home while helping their children write words, and the children's early literacy was assessed in the kindergarten. Maternal writing mediation was analyzed in terms of its cognitive and emotional aspects. Results show that beyond the child's age and his or her degree of hearing loss, the cognitive aspects of maternal writingmediation predicted word writing (11%), word recognition (34%), and letter knowledge (35%). Beyond the background measures, the emotional aspects of the mediation predicted word recognition (12%), letter knowledge (14%), and general knowledge (9%). Discussion focuses on writing interactions as a context of early literacy development among kindergartners with HI. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
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[Headnote] |
The study assessed the value of maternal writing mediation in predicting children's early literacy. Thirty kindergartners with hearing impairment (HI) and their mothers participated. Mothers were videotaped at home while helping their children write words, and the children's early literacywas assessed in the kindergarten. Maternal writing mediation was analyzed in terms of its cognitive and emotional aspects. Results show that beyond the child's age and his or her degree of hearing loss, the cognitive aspects of maternal writing mediation predicted word writing (11%), word recognition (34%), and letter knowledge (35%). Beyond the background measures, the emotional aspects of themediation predicted word recognition (12%), letter knowledge (14%), and general knowledge (9%). Discussion focuses on writing interactions as a context of early literacy development among kindergartners with HI. |
Keywords: joint writing; kindergartners; deaf/hearing impaired; parent-child interaction; early literacy; phonology |

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The study examined the context of early literacy developmentamong kindergartners with hearing impairment (HI), focusing on the role of mother-child collaborative writing. Success in acquiring literacy skills offers one of the central keys to scholastic achievement. Yet for many children with HI, reading and writing pose great difficulty (e.g., Howell & Luckner, 2003; Musselman, 2000), and progress in the literacy domain is extremely slow (Harris &Beech, 1998; Kyle & Harris, 2005; Marschark & Harris, 1996).
Studies of reading acquisition in children with HI have reported that their language skills, phonological awareness, and language comprehension in kindergarten predicted reading progress in first grade (Colin, Magnan, Ecalle, & Leybaert, 2004; Harris & Beech, 1998). The evidence regarding continuity in literacyachievements invites research to tease apart possible sources of these differences in early literacy among young children with HI.
Reading tasks require the same acquisition of skills whether a child is hearing or deaf (Luetke-Stahlman & Nielsen, 2003). Research on hearing children that has examined the issue of continuity in the transition from kindergarten to school has emphasized the role ofalphabetic skills and phonological awareness in kindergarten as chief predictors of decoding accuracy, reading fluency, and reading comprehension at the beginning of school (e.g., Badian, 2001; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Shanahan, 2001; Stern & Goswami, 2000). Compared with the wide volume of studies on hearing children's early literacy development, only a few investigators have...