The first article to be considered is the study of Edmondson titled “Deaf Children’s Understanding” – the study of Edmondson is focused on the “ability of deaf children to predict the behaviors of other people, based on an understanding of their beliefs” (Edmondson, 2006). The tools to study this ability in a focus group of 55 completely deaf children were an unexpected transfer task (hiding and replacing the sweets to ensure the child’s “basic understanding of the maneuvers and their memory of what they had seen”) and a deceptive box task (using a box with sweets and pencils).
The results brought about unexpected findings – it turned out that children of deaf parents accommodated to the challenging tasks better and easier than did children of hearing parents. As a result, the article together with the research findings gives a new clue to understanding the peculiarities of deaf children’s perception and to designing programs that would facilitate their development and enrich the available ways of communication.
The author discusses the importance of finding unified ways of communication with deaf children since there are many alternatives used individually, justifying the point by the growing number of deaf children. Peter Edmondson substantiates his research by discussing peculiarities of deaf and hearing children’s development, stressing the delay in “social understanding” deaf children experience, further complications of thought processes, etc. Conducting the literature review, the author substantiates the choice of research tools and explicitly describes the procedure of the experiment (Edmondson, 2006). The educational value of the study may be summarized as the necessity for a systematic, comprehensive design of reciprocal communication with deaf children to ensure their full and timely cognitive and emotional development.
The second article to be considered is the editorial by Donald Moores titled “Research on Bi-Bi Instruction” –the author speculates on the topic of ASL as a tool for educating the deaf and giving them wider opportunities for studying more than one language and bridging their knowledge with English. He argues that despite the enthusiastic beginning with the introduction of Bi-Bi programs (bilingual-bicultural) they did not meet the expectations and proved to be not that successful – the main reason for this being absence of supporting data (Moores, 2008). The most important problems now are the absence of connections between typed English and ASL, which has to be changed. The importance of the article applied to practical education is the need to use ASL effectively in the classroom – however, the debate on whether to leave the emphasis on bilingual instruction or not is still open (Moores, 2008).
The third article is titled “Literacy Publications: American Annals of the Deaf 1996 to 2000” – the title speaks for itself, as the authors touch upon the most aching and the most recent range of problems of the deaf. This article is a review of the 20 most significant publications made by Moores and Miller in 2001. In this article they identify areas of literacy important in the schooling process, investigate tendencies connected with the distribution of attention between phonics and whole language; they turn their attention to the increasing international cooperation on the issues of the deaf, study the importance of ASL in the education and consider different approaches to building up the system of education (Schimmel, Edwards and Pickett 1999) as well as conclusions on the use of Australasian Signed English to improve reading for the deaf (Moores and Miller, 2001). The authors also deal with other important events and research taking place in the sphere of reforming the education of the deaf and recognize the contribution these activists made to its development.
References
Edmondson, P. (2006). Deaf Children’s Understanding of Other People’s Thought Processes. Educational Psychology in Practice, Vol. 22, No.2, pp.159-169.
Moores, D. (2008). Research on Bi-Bi Instruction. American Annals of the Deaf. Vol. 153, No.1, pp. 3-4.
Moores, D.F. and M.S. Miller (2001) Literacy Publications: American Annals of the Deaf 1996 to 2000. American Annals of the Deaf, Vol. 146, No. 2, pp. 77-80.