Project PREPARE: Preparing preschoolers and kindergartners who are deaf to learn to read by teaching them early critical service words typically visually and linguistically inaccessible to them through a computer-based instruction product

Children with significant hearing loss continually exhibit low reading levels, due in part to the difficulty they face upon entering school of understanding basal reading vocabulary, especially early critical “service words.” Service words are those words that cannot be learned through the use of pictures or objects (e.g., apple) but that constitute up to 75% of all words used in basal readers. Service words consist of prepositions, conjunctions, articles, adverbs, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns. Deaf children, in preparation for school, have an especially difficult time learning these words because they cannot easily hear them or see the meanings and referents for these words, and because of their lack of visual exposure to these words from persons around them who use Total Communication (sign with speech) or American Sign Language. Project PREPARE proposes to address this need by developing a product, an interactive CD-ROM, to help prepare deaf preschoolers/kindergartners to learn to read critical service words by sights that they will encounter in their basal readers. During Phase I, one unit will be developed and field tested in classrooms of deaf children. Phase II will build on the development and field testing done in Phase I.