A Response to Ashley Greene-Woods
- A Response to Ashley Greene-Woods
The purpose of our empirical study, "The English-Language and Reading Achievement of a Cohort of Deaf Students Speaking and Signing Standard English: A Preliminary Study" (Nielsen et al., 2016), "was to investigate the English-language abilities and reading achievement of a sample of students who were D/HH [deaf and hard of hearing] and attended a school where staff and students communicated simultaneously in grammatically accurate Standard English via speech and S.E.E. [Signing Exact English]" (p. 348). This type of simultaneous communication has been a central component of the program for over 35 years. A goal of the staff is to keep abreast of the research, to study the effect of their practice on student achievement, and to change instruction as they learn more about how to help students reach their potential. The results of our study indicated that a developmental trend (and no plateau) in receptive and expressive English, as well as reading achievement, occurred for most of the children in the study. Most participants demonstrated average or above-average English abilities. English-language proficiency, as measured by the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–4 (CLEF-4; Semel et al., 2003), predicted reading achievement. We thought our findings helpful to those in the field of Deaf education because the results of programs that use S.E.E. are often excluded from literature reviews (e.g., Hall et al., 2019). More importantly, our study highlights the need for educators to find a way to provide access to the morphology of English regardless of one's first language or special needs, because it plays such an important role in supporting the continued development of readers.
Our manuscript was reviewed several times by different panels of researchers organized by the American Annals of the Deaf, and we revised it on the basis of the requests of these professionals. This process took more than the year. The following is our response to a critique of this study by Ashley Greene-Woods (which appears in the present issue of the Annals). We will respond to Greene-Woods's concerns in the order she presents them.
Introduction
In the first paragraph of her critique, Greene-Woods infers that our research stems from a belief that the use of sign language is associated with low intelligence. We take issue with this because our study did not involve adults or children who use American Sign Language (ASL), and we certainly do not associate the use [End Page 461] of ASL with low intelligence. We wholeheartedly agree with McCay Vernon, who made a career out of debunking this myth, for example in the article "Fifty Years of Research on the Intelligence of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children: A Review of Literature and Discussion of Implications" (Vernon, 2005).
In our work, we take the perspective that "one size does not fit all," and we published our research to share a report on the findings of a study conducted with students attending a school that provides an alternative to listening and spoken language (only) or the use of ASL. The school is located in a large metropolitan area where all three options (i.e., bilingual-bicultural, simultaneous use of speech and English via S.E.E., and listening and spoken English language) are available to families. Our school staff has a strong working relationship with parents as well as professionals in public and private educational programs in the area. Parents and district individualized education program teams, of which parents are members, choose the simultaneous communication (i.e., S.E.E.) program because they find it appropriate for the development of listening, speech articulation, and grammatically accurate English-language development—keys to a college education and employment (e.g., Appelman et al., 2012).
The introductory section of Greene-Woods's article ends with a description of her background (use of S.E.E. as a child, full access to English as a child, etc.). Although she was raised on S.E.E., her education differs from that of the children who participated in our study because, unlike...
