“They forget and forget all the time.” The complexity of teaching adult deaf emergent readers print literacy

3.1 The importance of memory

Another part of the challenge of learning a new language through print have been reported to be associated with memory. Deaf people not only need to memorise written words, but also their sign equivalents (including sign variants and concepts/meanings, as well as overlapping signs for the same concepts). This is more cognitively demanding because the “[r]eading process can cause cognitive overload in signing Deaf readers, as the reader’s working memory is tasked not only with decoding but with creating a ‘mental visualization’ (p. 40) of the printed word’s sign equivalent” (Falk et al. 2020 referring to Easterbrooks and Huston 2008, p. 40).

In order to achieve reading fluency, automatic word identification processes are necessary. Words that are highly frequent and thus (should be) automatically recognised are called “sight words”. In US English, a sight word vocabulary list has been established comprising the most frequently occurring words, e.g. the Dolch and Fry word list (Dolch 1936; Fry 1980). Readers familiar with these words can easily recognise them when reading (Also see 3.2.2, for further application of high-frequent/sighted words in pedagogical contexts). Basic print vocabulary allows readers to focus on understanding the words instead of decoding them, as the decoding process requires greater working memory capacity. Thus, knowing more sight words frees the working memory from decoding, and resources are given to comprehension work instead (Falk et al. 2020).

3.2 Pedagogical strategies

In a formal second language learning context, teachers constantly try to find different pedagogical strategies to help students progress in their learning. For example, teachers make different improvements in language vocabulary instruction. However, teachers of the deaf constantly have to formulate their own strategies to teach their students because much of the literature is sound-based, and curricula are developed with hearing students in mind. Below, we will describe three core strategies in deaf classrooms found in the literature that will be connected with our findings later.

4.1 Method and material

Following an ethnographic approach, the research team used observations and interviews to examine the learning context at the different schools. The classes were followed in different lessons during the whole school day, and the classroom interaction was documented through video recordings and field notes. The research team visited the schools several times on different days over four semesters (although the second semester was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic). A total of approximately 45 h of video-recorded classroom interaction were created in the project. In the classroom interaction, a total of 65 participants were included (48 migrants and 17 staff).

In addition to interaction data, interviews were also conducted (all through Swedish Sign Language) with both deaf migrant participants and their teachers. The background interviews comprised approximately 13 h of video recordings and focused on the migrants’ backgrounds and previous experiences, for example, their country of origin, how their families look like, which language(s) they use, and their previous education. However, it is important to mention that conducting the participant interviews could be challenging at times because it depended on the participants’ skills in STS (and other languages), their understanding of their own background and current situation, and their ability to share their experiences. A total of 43 deaf migrants were interviewed, of which 17 were men and 26 were women. Their age ranged from 18 to 60 years and they came from different parts of the world, mainly Western Asia (19 participants). The other participants came from Europe (11), Africa (7), South and East Asia (5) and North America (1). Many migrants had difficulties describing their previous language knowledge: 3 state STS as their first learned language, 7 cannot give a clear answer and 9 mention gestures or homesign as their communication forms. Thirteen migrants have never attended school.

The teachers were interviewed about their educational and linguistic background, teaching experience, and knowledge and experiences of teaching deaf migrants (see Table 1). In total, 14 teachers were interviewed, of which five were men and nine were women. Of the teachers, 11 were deaf and three were hearing. All teachers are proficient in STS. The interviews generated approximately 13 h of video recordings.

The 43 migrants constitute a very heterogeneous group with very different linguistic and educational backgrounds. However, in this sub-study, the focus was on the migrants who have never attended school and are emergent readers. They are sometimes taught individually, and sometimes in a group with other emergent readers. At other times they participate in groups with participants with a higher level of print literacy knowledge. For this sub-study we have qualitatively analysed the classroom interaction, focusing on Swedish language lessons (approx. 15 h of recordings including all four schools) in which one or more emergent readers were included. In the analysis, we searched for common exercises and recurring patterns in the recorded instruction and after transcribed these into written English. Through this work, we identified five themes which will be presented in the results section below.

5.1 Writing techniques

Emergent readers have to learn a whole new technique when they start learning how to write. In present-day Sweden, this means both handwriting and computer typing. However, here, we will zoom in on handwriting exercises because these seem to be the most complex. Computer typing technique seems to be easier to develop after having learned the alphabet and uppercase and lowercase letters. The migrants can look at written texts and replicate them by typing. Also, this basic knowledge of computer typing and the alphabet allowed them to search for Swedish words in Google pictures or in the STS dictionary. Interestingly, we found that several emergent readers experienced significant difficulty logging on to computers or platforms because they struggled with the process of using usernames and passwords.

Handwriting exercises occurred in several forms, as illustrated in pictures a–d in Figure 2. Emergent readers and migrants with other writing systems than the Latin system were taught to write letters by copying and repeating them in print (picture a), writing from left to right, up to down, and on the lines. They were also taught to write words and sentences by copying and repeating (picture b). The exercises differed between the participants, depending on how recently they had arrived, their previous writing skills, and how quickly they learned to write.

Figure 2:

Different handwriting exercises (pictures a–d). Alt text: Different hand-writing exercises cover learning to write the Latin alphabet by copying capital and lowercase letters on rows, copying words and phrases, training to express phrases, and responding to written questions.

As illustrated in picture c, it is not obvious how emergent readers understand how to write sentences. Here, Rashid (emergent reader, arrived in Sweden 1.5 years ago) practices writing his name in sentences, copying a sentence on the board that the teacher has written. When looking at the lines, it is possible to see how the space between the letters becomes bigger and bigger, row by row. In the last rows, the first word in the sentence, jag ‘I’, is spelt as if it is two words instead of one.

Another interesting feature in the learn-to-write process is illustrated in picture d. As previously shown, most exercises are about copying and repeating pre-written letters, words or sentences. Here, however, the participant is going to learn to write answers to questions or add the last part of a sentence without having a pre-written text to copy. In the first sentence, where the first two pre-written words are Jag heter ‘My name is’, Lateefa (emergent reader, arrived in Sweden four years ago) manages to respond correctly with her name, but in the next sentence, Jag kommer från ‘I come from’, she just copies the same words instead of answering with the name of her country. A number of teachers have confirmed that some emergent readers often responded to questions with a copy of the question in itself and mentioned that it was difficult to get them to understand that it was a question they should respond to instead of just copying it.

5.2 Vocabulary training through fingerspelling

In the classrooms, fingerspelling exercises are a common part of vocabulary training. One example is when the teacher Anna, Lateefa and Mahad (emergent reader, arrived in Sweden two years ago) are working with three words, juice ‘juice’ haj ‘shark’ and olja ‘oil’, which have been written on the whiteboard. There was also a TV with pictures from Google. Anna starts by asking Lateefa and Mahad to fingerspell juice. Excerpt 1 below shows the interaction between Anna and the two participants.

Anna clearly tried to structure and scaffold Lateefa’s and Mahad’s fingerspelling of the words. However, despite the word being visible on the whiteboard and Anna fingerspelling the word, letter by letter, both participants, especially Lateefa, have difficulties finding the correct manual alphabet for each letter as in (3) while searching for the U. Anna tried to scaffold through drawing the u in the space as in writing the u. In (6), Lateefa confuses the letter i with the letter l, which is not surprising as i and l are similar in form. In (8), Lateefa first responds to the manual alphabet of S but changes to C. This is interesting as these manual alphabets share the same hand shape and the only difference between them is the hand orientation. The same applies to Mahad in (9) when he hesitated between the manual alphabets of O, G and E. In STS, they look similar in form, i.e. like a fist, but with variation in how the thumb is positioned.

After completing this turn of joint fingerspelling, Anna asked them to do it again. Mahad managed to pair the letters with the manual alphabets, while Lateefa got stuck again at the second letter u in (12). Interestingly, Lateefa refers to N as it has the same handshape as U but with a different hand orientation. The excerpt illustrates the complexity of matching letters to manual alphabets. On the one hand, the visual orthography of Swedish letters is not easy to learn, and there are letters that have similar forms (e.g. i and l). On the other hand, the manual alphabets need to be acquired as well, and many manual alphabets have similar hand configurations (i.e. C and S, G and E). The fingerspelling session with the remaining words haj and olja clearly shows that the learners have difficulties decoding the letters and pairing them with the manual alphabet. For example, with the j in haj and olja, Mahad hesitates between I, J, and Y despite practicing correctly on j in the previous word, juice. However, in this context, each word starts with an uppercase letter, i.e. Juice, Haj and Olja. The difference between J and j, as well as the phonological similarity of J and Y (same handshape but different movements), adds complexity to the learning. The fact that the sign equivalent of juice is a lexicalized fingerspelling makes it even more difficult to link the word to the sign. Anna prototypically refers to it as an “orange drink” although there are different kinds of juice. This excerpt further illustrates the importance of careful planning of what words to train and how to practice them, as well as the awareness of the complexity of letters and manual alphabets.

5.3 Vocabulary training using word lists

Another vocabulary exercise is to create lists of Swedish words together by negotiating topics or themes. The teacher usually initiates a theme and asks the participants for words fitting into this theme. The list is gradually expanded during the lesson, and the participants write down the Swedish words in their notebooks, which become filled with a range of words on different topics. STS is constantly used in the negotiation of words. One such recurring exercise is illustrated in Figure 3, in which the teacher Angela starts writing the Swedish word Möbler ‘Furniture’, as illustrated in picture a. She asked Ana (who has previous print literacy skills but recently arrived in Sweden) and Hussein (emergent reader, arrived in Sweden five years ago) for the equivalent STS sign. They both signs the STS sign FURNITURE and Angela agrees. She mentions that they are focusing on the living room by writing Vardagsrum ‘Living room’ on the board. Angela turns to Ana and Hussein, signing LIVING-ROOM, and they imitate the sign. Angela continues, asking which furniture they can find in this room. Hussein illustrates the shape of a sofa or an armchair, and Angela asks him to fingerspell the word, but he responds that he does not know. Angela turns to Ana, but she does not know either. Angela writes the word Soffa ‘Sofa’ on the board (picture b). She then adds different types of sofas for two or three persons, and corner sofas. After this, the negotiation continues and the list is expanded. During the negotiation, Ana and Hussein begin to suggest furniture that is usually found in other rooms, such as makeup tables and bathroom cabinets, and Angela adds them to the list but soon realises that the words do not belong to the topic of “living room” and draws a circle around them with a line and an arrow to connect them to the heading Sovrum ‘bedroom’ instead (picture c).

Figure 3:

Vocabulary training (picture a–c). Alt text: The teacher writes words related to the living room on the whiteboard.

After a while, Fatima (emergent reader, arrived in Sweden five years ago) joins the class, and Angela asks Ana and Hussein to note the words on the board in their notebooks. She turns to Fatima, directing her attention to the board that is covered with the range of words that Ana and Hussein have suggested, meaning that Fatima’s learning takes a totally different path. Angela points to the first word Soffa ‘Sofa’, and Fatima fingerspells the word correctly. However, she does not know the meaning of the word, although she can fingerspell the word letter by letter. Angela therefore explains what a sofa is using different signs and examples. And the teaching continues this way. As Fatima was not involved in the previous negotiation process, she is exposed to many words, drawings and arrows simultaneously all over the place.

The example shows how difficult it is for emergent readers (Hussein and Fatima) to connect signs, fingerspelling and written words to meaning. Although Ana has recently arrived in Sweden, she is literate in both Persian and English and appears to develop her written Swedish skills rapidly, while Hussein and Fatima have developed very limited written Swedish skills, even though they have been in Sweden for five years.

The difficulties in using a broad vocabulary and several synonyms were also present in other exercises. For example, it is common to play memory games to pair words with pictures. Word cards can be placed on one side of the table and picture cards on the other. The participants turn the cards, trying to match words that are equivalent to pictures. Hussein turns over a picture card with a house and another card with the word hus ‘house’. However, Ana says that it is not the correct word for that picture. Hussein insists and checks the STS dictionary on his mobile phone. He found the sign for house and was satisfied with being correct. However, Ana is still not convinced. When Angela arrives, she confirms that hus is wrong, as it should be radhus ‘terraced house’. The words are similar, both referring to a type of house, and it seems that the large variety of pictures and words makes everything too complex for the emergent readers, who would benefit from a memory game that had a more limited word list (see also Duggan forthcoming).

5.4 Surface versus deep reading – transliteration

It is seldom that emergent readers independently read texts in the classroom. This is supposedly due to their limited written language skills. Instead, the exercises mainly focus on vocabulary training and connecting words with pictures, usually using Google. The usual exercises mean that emergent readers get documents with different Swedish words and pictures that they try to match using Google or the STS dictionary.

However, a recurring activity in Swedish instruction is joint reading activities in which migrants from different backgrounds are taught collectively. This kind of activity means that the class looks at a page from a book (e.g. via a screen in the classroom) and signs the text word by word together (i.e. transliterating^[1]). The teacher sometimes writes the same text on the board to make it easier to point to separate words while the whole class can see them (see Figure 4).

Figure 4:

The teacher writes the same sentences from a book on the board. Alt text: A digital screen with a text is visible in the classroom and the teacher write the same sentences on a blackboard.

This method means that the participants learn to connect words with sign equivalents, but it is unclear to what extent they understand the texts’ meaning. It depends on their varied linguistic repertoires. Sometimes, like in the exercise illustrated in Figure 4, the teachers ask the participants to translate the content into STS after having transliterated the text word by word into STS. In such cases, it is apparent that those participants with limited knowledge of Swedish and STS cannot translate as translation requires proficiency in both languages. The emergent readers in our study have not acquired sufficient vocabulary to be able to translate and, for them, the process of first transliterating a written text into STS and then translating it into “real” STS appears to be rather confusing.

For those participants who have some knowledge of print literacy, transliteration also occur when they independently read texts. But while participants with more robust knowledge of print literacy use dictionaries from their home country’s written language (or any written language they previously knew), those participants with more limited knowledge appear to only have STS dictionaries as tools. In Excerpt 2, Flora, who has some previous knowledge of print literacy, reads a text and signs it word by word, i.e. connects a written word to its sign equivalent but follows the grammatical structure of written Swedish.

When Flora searches for the word helst ‘preferably’ in the dictionary, she gets a variety of available sign equivalents. The first sign is a fingerspelled version of the same word, which does not help her, so she chooses the next and finds a sign that matches the Swedish word. After a while, she arrives at the phrase gå hem och byta om ‘went home to change’. Here, Flora does not capture the difference between the Swedish phrase byta om and the STS phrase CHANGE CLOTHES. Instead, the transliteration leads to an unintelligible utterance because om as a single word means ‘if’ and ‘again’ (among others). However, in this context, om functions as a particle verb which, together with the verb byta, gives a specific meaning associated with “change clothes”. Although learners may have no problem mapping single words with signs, there comes a point when learners need to expand their vocabulary to recognise that some words are part of basic phrases such as byta om ‘change’, växa upp ‘grow up’. These can be hard for learners to learn and teachers to teach and, in such contexts, the transliteration process may result in a completely erroneous meaning. In their three-way model for print literacy learning, Hoffmeister and Caldwell-Harris (2014) point out that many deaf students struggle with this stage of print literacy learning, while sign-word mapping is often fairly unproblematic.

5.5 Cognitive aspects of literacy learning

A common pattern in teaching emergent readers is that they seem to forget written words almost immediately after they have learned them. In the interviews, several teachers highlighted this as a challenge and felt that they lacked the strategies to support the participants. For example, the teacher Angela states:

Many of the participants have such a hard time with [writing Swedish]. And if they didn’t learn to read and write in their home country, it’s even more difficult. […] They even have difficulties with the hand alphabet, that each letter is meaningful, they have such a hard time grasping that – they’re just like symbols for them … We have three participants like this now and they wouldn’t be able to read a note from their employer saying “Can you go to the warehouse and pick up xxx” … They wouldn’t have a clue. They imitate a lot – I think they try to learn written words through visual memory and repeatedly practicing to remember. Sometimes they see a word and then they say “I’ve forgotten how to sign it” – but they haven’t forgotten, they don’t know what the word means. I can sign CUCUMBER and then they say “yes exactly that” and mean that they forgot the sign. But that’s not the case, they don’t understand the word. [---] They keep forgetting. We can go through the same word list seven to eight times and they still don’t remember. It’s something in the brain – they haven’t practiced that. But in STS it gets stuck.

One example of this is illustrated in Excerpt 3. Here, the teacher, Fanny and Fatima negotiate the meaning of written words on the whiteboard. It is full of Swedish words for different kitchen items, e.g. spis ‘stove’, ugn ‘oven’, diskmaskin ‘dishwasher’, mikro ‘micro’. The Swedish word mikro is a contraction of mikrovågsugn ‘microwave oven’. The full Swedish word ends with “-ugn”, the same as in the single word ugn ‘oven’. Fatima has no problem fingerspelling the written words but has difficulties connecting the correct sign equivalent to the written words and remembering them.

When Fanny points to the word spis ‘stove’ (1), Fatima wrongly suggests the sign for MICROWAVE-OVEN (2). Fanny lets her know that it is wrong, and Fatima then suggests the correct sign STOVE (4). Fanny then points to the next word, ugn ‘oven, and Fatima again suggests MICROWAVE-OVEN (8), but Fanny replies that it is wrong. Fatima fingerspells UGN@b again and tries the sign for MACHINE (10), which is also wrong. Fanny seems to not notice the sign MACHINE, but points to Fatima and says that the sign she has used means micro with the sign equivalent MICROWAVE-OVEN. Then Fanny points again to the word ugn ‘oven’ and Fatima suggests a third sign: DISH (14), also the wrong sign. Fanny tells her the correct sign, OVEN, and Fatima seems to slump, looking both surprised and frustrated (16). Her signing is then a little unclear, but she seems to say that she must practice more. After being briefly interrupted by another participant, Fanny again fingerspells and signs ‘oven’, and Fanny continues to the next word on the list, diskmaskin ‘dishwasher’. Fatima fingerspells correctly but immediately suggests the same sign, OVEN, for this next word (28). Thus, Fatima seems not to be able to make the connections between the written, fingerspelled and sign equivalents and seems to immediately forget the recently negotiated equivalents through using the same sign again. Here it is clear that Fatima’s working memory is very short and that the cognitive workload is too high for her to handle the exercise and manage to add new knowledge.