Reading levels of Spanish deaf students

THE READING LEVELS of a population of 93 Spanish deaf students were examined. All study participants had prelingual profound hearing loss; their ages ranged from 9 to 20 years. All were enrolled in compulsory education during 2002-2003 in the Canary Islands (Spain). They were evaluated with sentence and text comprehension subtests from the Evaluation of Reading Processes of Primary Education Students, whose Spanish acronym is PROLEC (Cuetos, Rodríguez, & Ruano, 1996). A questionnaire on reading attitude was also used (Espín, 1987). Study results were consistent with those of previous research: Deaf students, at the end of their primary school education (mean age 13 years), have reading levels similar to or lower than the reading levels of hearing students at the onset of primary school education (mean age 7 years). These deaf students also have an indifferent attitude toward reading.     

Social Studies Teachers’ Attitudes and Beliefs About Immigration and the Formal Curriculum in the United States South: A Multi-Methods Study

Teachers’ beliefs and awareness regarding immigration policy is an area of research that has been largely unexplored in the broader discussion of socio-political consciousness and critical social studies education. This study is based on a multi-methods methodology, particularly a partially mixed sequential equal status design (Leech and Onwuegbuzie in Qual Quant 43(2):265–275, 2009). The quantitative portion of this study is based on a survey conducted in 2017 among K-12 teachers nationwide (n?=?5190) and a nested sample of 200 Southern Social Studies teachers. (McCorkle in The awareness and attitudes of teachers towards educational restrictions for immigrant students. Doctoral dissertation, Clemson University, 2018a). The qualitative sample is a content analysis from an examination of South Carolina social studies textbooks (n?=?8). The quantitative analysis revealed a concerning pattern of unawareness of immigration policy among many teachers as well as a strong relationship between embrace of false immigration narratives and exclusionary attitudes towards immigrant students. The analysis of the textbooks showed little in the formal curriculum that would problematize false immigration narratives and instead demonstrated a tendency to bolster these narratives. The results reveal a need of teacher education programs and additional professional development to help critique these “common-sense” (mis)understandings about immigration that are factually incorrect and help contribute to the larger patterns of xenophobia in the society.

     

The role of cued speech in the development of Spanish prepositions

The aim of the present study was to advance the knowledge of the linguistic development of students with prelingual profound deafness, especially the acquisition and use of prepositions in Spanish, a lexical category with an important role in the verbal comprehension. The researchers sought to learn the level of mastery students with prelingual profound deafness can achieve in the command of prepositions, depending on the system of communication they have been exposed to: classic oralism, Cued Speech, or signed language. The results show that the different systems of communication contribute, to different degrees, to the acquisition of Spanish prepositions, with the best results being obtained with Cued Speech.