Learning English literacy is a great challenge for congenitally, profoundly deaf students, who do not have the range of experiences with sounds necessary for using letter-sound correspondences accurately. However, written English represents through letters not only sounds but also morphemes, which are basic units of meaning: for example, the word “magician”, which seems irregular from a letter-sound correspondence analysis, is regular if analysed into its morphemes, “magic” and “ian”. If deaf students can learn to use morphemes in analysing written words, they could make further progress in literacy learning. Morphemes and grammar are strongly interconnected: for this reason, students might also improve their reading comprehension and writing from learning about morphemes.

We developed and assessed a teaching programme for deaf primary school students aimed at improving their awareness of grammar and morphology in written English. A total of 112 deaf students (aged 7 to 12 years) participated in this study. A baseline of students’ performance was collected in one year; an intervention was implemented in the subsequent year and its results analysed by comparison with the baseline. The teaching programme contained IT supported exercises to promote awareness of morphemes, games to offer the students extra practice with morphemes, and especially designed story books, which exposed the students to the words in context and created the opportunity for further exercises. These materials can be downloaded from http://www.edstud.ox.ac.uk/research/childlearning/index.html

The students were pre- and post-tested in the use of suffixes in spelling, reading comprehension and writing. Post-test results, controlling for age, hearing loss, IQ and pre-test scores, showed that the students who had participated in the programme significantly outperformed the comparison group in all three measures. The programme was described by a deaf teacher as “not a magic key but certainly another brick on the wall”.

Learning English literacy is a great challenge for congenitally, profoundly deaf students, who do not have the range of experiences with sounds necessary for using letter-sound correspondences accurately. However, written English represents through letters not only sounds but also morphemes, which are basic units of meaning: for example, the word “magician”, which seems irregular if analysed according to letter-sound correspondences, is regular if analysed into its morphemes, “magic” and “ian”. If deaf students can learn to use morphemes in analysing written words, they could make further progress in literacy learning. Morphemes and grammar are strongly interconnected: for this reason, students might also improve their reading comprehension and writing from learning about morphemes.

Previous research (e.g. Fabretti et al., 1998; McAfee et al., 1990) shows that deaf adolescents and adults do not use morphemes consistently in their writing. This suggests that they may require special instruction for mastering morphemes. Instruction about morphemes is not offered to English students currently as part of speech therapy, which aims at developing lip-reading and speech intelligibility.

There is already a vast body of research showing that morphological awareness is related to hearing students’ reading and spelling abilities (e.g. Carlisle & Stone, 2003; Bryant & Nunes, 2004). We hypothesised that, with systematic teaching, it would be possible to significantly improve deaf students’ use of morphology in spelling, with related significant gains in reading in writing.

Participants were deaf students (N=112) in the age range 7 to 12 years attending special or mainstream schools with units for the hearing impaired in England. Degree of hearing loss was 12% moderate or mild; 10% moderate; 19% severe; 35% severe-profound or profound; 24% were not classified because they had received a cochlear implant.

The design involved a comparison of an intervention group, composed of students who received the teaching programme, and a baseline, collected by assessing as many students as possible in the first year of the project. The control group comprised 83 students from 14 schools; the intervention group comprised 35 students from 11 schools. The teaching programme was implemented in the second year of the project. The teachers received a one-day training, during which they found out about research results showing that deaf students do not use morphemes in spelling as well as hearing students do, and discussed the materials that had been designed to promote deaf students’ awareness of English grammar and morphemes. The teachers implemented the programme in their own classroom. Researchers followed their progress with the materials and delivered further teaching aids as the teachers completed the work on the preceding ones.

The intervention included IT supported exercises with morphemes (adding or subtracting suffixes and prefixes to stems to form words), games designed to promote further practice in morphemic analysis, especially designed books that offered practice on target grammatical and morphological constructions (e.g. past tense of regular verbs; agentives), and frameworks with instructions for teachers to help the students create their own books using target constructions. The materials were developed using a database (created for this project) of word frequencies from texts provided by teachers of the deaf. Frequent words were used at the outset of the programme but vocabulary growth was also planned. The materials and the database can be downloaded from http://www.edstud.ox.ac.uk/research/childlearning/index.html

The students were given three identical pre- and post-tests: use of suffixes in spelling, reading comprehension and a writing task, analysed by six levels of achievement. These measures were developed for the project and were validated by comparison with a version of the Schonell Word Reading and Word Spelling tests, adapted for administration to deaf students. This analysis, applied to the pre-test data, showed that all correlations between the different measures were significant; the lowest correlation was .64. Only one factor could be extracted, which accounted for 79% of the variance; all factor loadings were above .8. The test-retest correlations for the three measures developed for the project were all above .8. This preliminary analysis showed that our three measures were reliable and valid and could be used to assess the intervention.

The intervention group outperformed the control group at post-test in all three measures. Three analyses of covariance were carried out with group (intervention vs control) as the independent variable and each of our three measures as outcome. The covariates were the students’ age, non-verbal intelligence (assessed by the Raven’s matrices), degree of hearing loss, the use of a cochlear implant, and their pre-test performance on the same measure. Significant main effects of the intervention were observed in all these analyses: for use of suffix in spelling, F_1,75=56.79; p<.0001; Cohen’s d effect size = 0.7 of a standard deviation;  for reading comprehension, F_1,105=19.59; p<.0001; Cohen’s d = 0.7 of a standard deviation; for levels of writing achievement, F_1,89=16.67; p<.001; Cohen’s d = 0.5 of a standard deviation.

We conclude that it is possible to develop a teaching programme to help deaf students understand English grammar and morphology that captures the students’ and teachers’ interest and can significantly improve English literacy instruction for deaf students. Schools in England have typically not included this form of instruction for either hearing or deaf primary students. Our past research shows that instruction on morphemes has positive effects on hearing students’ vocabulary growth. It was not possible to measure this effect with deaf students as current vocabulary measures are not suitable for this purpose. Further work could assess the impact of such an intervention on a wider range of literacy related measures. Our results strongly support the need for instruction on grammar and morphemes to be integrated in the curriculum for deaf primary school students.