Meeting global deaf peers, visiting ideal deaf places: deaf ways of education leading to empowerment, an exploratory case study

In a flemish case study, deaf role models revealed a moment of awakening, indicated by the Flemish sign WAKE-UP Contact with deaf cultural rhetoric made them wake up, and deconstruct and reconstruct their lives, a process represented by a circle of deaf empowerment. Flemish deaf leaders mentioned acquiring this rhetoric during visits to deaf dream worlds (in Flemish Sign Language, WORLD DREAM): places with ideal conditions for deaf people. Such global deaf encounters (Breivik, Haualand, & Solvang, 2002) lead to the "insurrection of subjugated [deaf] knowledges" (Pease, 2002, p. 33). Whereas deaf education had never provided them with deaf cultural rhetoric and was depositing upon them oppressive societal conventions (Jankowski, 1997), a common sign language (Mottez, 1993) and global deaf experience (Breivik et al., 2002; Murray, in press) in barrier-free environments (Jankowski, 1997) provided deaf ways of deaf education (Erting, 1996; Reilly, 1995).     

Lexical and sublexical orthographic knowledge: relationships in an orthography of intermediate depth

It is widely accepted that orthographic knowledge comprises two components: word-specific orthographic knowledge, also termed lexical orthographic knowledge, and general orthographic knowledge, or sublexical orthographic knowledge. Until now, the study of the relationship between these components throughout literacy development has been somehow neglected. In this study, we examined how they are related at an early stage of literacy development in European Portuguese, an orthography of intermediate depth. Children followed from Grade 2–3 performed two of the most common tasks of orthographic knowledge—the Orthographic Choice Task and the Orthographic Awareness Task. Crossed-lagged structural equation modeling showed significant mutual contributions between the two components of orthographic knowledge, providing thus preliminary evidence of bidirectional relations over time. Results are discussed in the context of theories of reading development taking into account the influence of orthography consistency.

     

Promoting phonemic analysis ability among kindergartners

Two longitudinal studies following the design used by Lundberg et al's (1988) aimed at examining the effects of different metaphonological training programs on phonemic analysis ability acquisition among kindergartners (mean age: 5 years 5 months in both studies). In Study 1, two training programs involving either rhymes, syllables and phonemes, or rhymes and syllables only, were administered to different groups. Progress in phonemic analysis ability was exclusively observed in the group whose training included phonemes. An untrained control group displayed no progress in metaphonological ability. In Study 2, two training programs involving either phonemes or syllables were administered to different groups. A third group was trained on non-linguistic visual analysis. Specific effects of training on phonemic analysis ability were disclosed again. While a phoneme-to-supraphoneme generalization was found among the group trained with phonemes, the reverse did not happen among the group trained with syllables. These results support the idea that processes involved in syllabic analysis of speech or in rhyme manipulation cannot be applied to its phonemic structure. In addition, training with non-linguistic visual analysis did not entail any progress in metaphonological ability, thus providing evidence that phonological awareness cannot be promoted by analysis abilities acquired in another domain.