Teaching Writing to Deaf Students

Abstract

The purpose of this review of the research on writing instruction with deaf students was to determine which findings offer evidence for effective practice. The authors used a framework of critical elements developed from research on hearing writers as a set of findings to which they compared the findings with deaf writers. They identified 16 studies of writing instruction over the past 25 years. Research on approaches for teaching writing to hearing students fell into four categories: teaching the process approach, instruction on characteristics of quality writing, writing for content learning, and feedback. Although all of the studies on teaching writing to deaf students fell into one of these categories, outcomes were equivocal and the evidence for practice is at best promising. They conclude that rigorous research is acutely needed so that writing instruction can be better informed by research findings.

Keywords

deaf writing writing instruction intervention teaching methods

Writing has been described as one of “humankind’s most powerful tools” (MacArthur, Graham, & Fitzgerald, 2006, p. 1) in enabling communication across distance and time. In spite of the importance of writing, the teaching of writing has received far less attention than the teaching of reading. Certainly, one indication is the establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) in 1997 by the U.S. Congress to assess the research evidence for the skills that are critical for becoming an independent reader and for the effectiveness of methods and approaches to the teaching of reading. Another indication is the more recent establishment of the National Early Literacy Panel in 2008 to synthesize the research on the development of early literacy skills in children from birth to age 5. No similar national panel has been initiated for writing.

The conclusions drawn by the NRP sparked intense debate among educators because of the restricted set of research studies meeting the methodological standards the Panel adopted to screen the extant research and the focus on five topic areas only—phonemic awareness, phonics instruction, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension instruction (NRP, 2000). Since the report of the Panel was published, these five topic areas have taken on such prominence that reading curricula now typically revolve around them and state reading standards address these as critical elements for effective reading instruction (Schenk, Walker, Nagel, & Webb, 2005). These five areas have also served as a schema for organizing research-based practices in reading (e.g., Edmonds et al., 2009; Wanzek & Vaughn, 2007).

No such schema is widely accepted for examining and organizing research on writing instruction. The lack of a schema makes it difficult to synthesize what is known about effective writing instruction for all students and specifically for deaf students. Identifying a schema by which the research on writing instruction could be synthesized and analyzed would offer direction for future research and suggestions for current teaching with deaf students.

The purpose of this review is to assess the evidence base for current approaches to writing instruction with deaf students and to compare results to the body of research on hearing writers without disabilities.

Deaf Students and Writing: An Overview

The most recent data from the Center for Disease Control indicates that in 2008, approximately 0.1% of infants younger than 12 months were born with a hearing loss (Government Accountability Office, 2011) making deafness a low-incidence occurrence. Various terms are used to describe individuals with a hearing loss: hearing impaired, D/deaf,¹ and hard of hearing. In face-to-face communication, deaf individuals may use speech, sign language, or both speech and sign language, often called sign-supported speech. Communication in sign may be in American Sign Language (ASL), which is a language unrelated to English, or in an English-based sign system such as Signing Exact English (SEE) or in Pidgin Sign, ASL signs in English word order. SEE and Pidgin Sign would enable the deaf individual to simultaneously speak and sign. ASL, due to the fact that its grammar and word order are different from English, cannot be used while speaking English. A deaf person’s first language could be ASL or English via an English-based sign system and/or oral English.

Many deaf children face a lag in developing any first language. This might be due to delays in identification of the hearing loss and in obtaining an appropriate assistive listening device. Because assistive listening devices amplify but are not corrective, the auditory input that some deaf children hear may have gaps. The delay in language acquisition might also be a consequence of hearing parents learning ASL or an English-based sign system but only being steps ahead of their child, thereby providing a less linguistically rich environment during the critical years for language acquisition. Although delays in language acquisition may become less frequent given the increasing popularity of cochlear implants, advances in technology, and earlier identification, many deaf children enter school with language delays and possibly little knowledge of English (Marschark, Lang, & Albertini, 2002; Mayer, 2007).

Educators grapple with how to best teach literacy (English in print) to their deaf students, in particular with whether the linguistic interdependence model of Cummins’ bilingual approach can or should be applied or modified for instruction of students whose first language is ASL (Mayer & Wells, 1996). The interdependence model assumes that individuals have access to literacy in their first language. ASL, however, does not have a written form. Consequentially, ASL users cannot transfer literacy proficiency in their first language to English. However, deaf individuals who communicate in an English-based sign system or via spoken English have a bridge connecting their face-to-face language to print. Proponents of using the bilingual model with users of ASL advocate that literacy in English can occur without individuals having literacy skills in their first language. The available research is inconclusive in regard to the bilingual model’s theoretical constructs and effectiveness of instructional practices in regard to users of ASL learning English literacy skills (for reviews of this literature, see Albertini & Schley, 2011; Mayer & Wells, 1996; Paul, 2008).

Comprehensive reviews synthesizing studies of the quality or characteristics of writing done by deaf students have been published (Albertini & Schley, 2011; Antia, Reed, & Kreimeyer, 2005; Mayer, 2010; Paul, 2008). This body of research, which often did not consider the participants’ first language, indicates that the texts typically produced by deaf students are comprehensible but are characterized as lacking in organization and supporting detail, choppy, and immature. These traits are likely due to the deaf students’ incomplete control over English syntax and limited vocabulary relative to their hearing peers.

Interestingly, studies using observational methodology to describe the environments in which emergent writing occurs (Andrews & Gonzales, 1991; Rottenberg & Searfoss, 1992; Williams, 1994) indicate that when the learning environment is inviting and encouraging and when authentic writing is valued and rewarded, deaf and hard of hearing preschoolers show similar emergent writing abilities as hearing children. Mayer’s (2007) analysis of writing in deaf 4- to 7-year-olds seems to indicate that their skills diverge from those of hearing children when conventional writing begins or at the point at which the child needs to connect writing to spoken or signed language. Research also indicates that on entering college, many deaf students are still in need of writing remediation and are placed in writing remediation classes (Schley & Albertini, 2005). Although no data are available that specifically indicate when during the school years deaf students diverge in their writing development and abilities, assessments of the quality of their writing products show that deaf 17-year-olds write like hearing 10-year-olds (Albertini & Schley, 2011; Mayer, 2010; Paul, 2008).

Findings from the research on the writing development and achievement of deaf students underlie the importance of determining whether research offers evidence for the effectiveness of instructional approaches that might improve these outcomes. It is, therefore, only the research on instructional practice that we consider in this review.

Mode of Inquiry

As there is no equivalent to the NRP report for writing instruction research, we began our inquiry with Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007), a report to Carnegie Corporation that was published by the Alliance for Excellent Education. Although the Carnegie Corporation and the Alliance for Excellent Education are private entities, each holds national prestige. Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007) is a meta-analysis of research on strategies designed to improve the writing of middle and high school students. As Graham and Perin (2007) note, meta-analysis is “a powerful statistical method . . . [which] allows researchers to determine the consistency and strength of the effects of instructional practices on student writing quality and to highlight those practices that hold the most promise” (p. 4). We next looked at synthetic reviews of writing research. Over the past 40 years, several notable reviews have been published. We identified the two most recent publications as primary sources for reviews of the research literature on writing instruction—Handbook of Writing Research (MacArthur et al., 2006) and Handbook of Research on Writing (Bazerman, 2008). Both of these handbooks have received excellent reviews (Glasswell & Kamberelis, 2006; Olive, 2007; Simons, 2007), and, as noted by Simons (2007), “Collectively the books review the writing research of the last thirty years and offer a bonanza of knowledge about writing for both researchers and practitioners (para. 1).”

Using grounded theory procedures (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), we first culled a set of critical elements for writing instruction from the critical reviews in the recent handbooks. The elements we identified had a high overlap with those outlined in Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007). We organized the critical elements into categories and subcategories rather than just listing them as in Writing Next. Second, we identified key findings for each of these critical elements from this body of research. Third, we reviewed the body of research literature on the writing instruction of deaf students enrolled in elementary schools through undergraduate studies in college. Fourth, we compared findings from the research with deaf students with the key findings from the body of research on hearing writers without disabilities.

To identify research on writing instruction with deaf students, we searched the following electronic databases: EBSCOhost, ERIC, PsycInfo, and WilsonWeb OmniFile. The literature search terms used included deaf, deafness, and hearing impaired in combination with each of the following: teaching methods, writing, writing improvement, writing instruction, and sentence combining. In addition, we conducted a manual search of the following journals: American Annals of the Deaf, Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Sign Language Studies, and Volta Review. We applied the following criteria to identify studies to be included: (a) reported an empirical study, (b) published in a peer-reviewed venue within the past 25 years, and (c) investigated an instructional intervention designed to improve the writing of deaf students. Of the 16 studies meeting the established criteria, 14 used an experimental methodological design (i.e., randomized control trial, quasi-experimental, or single-subject studies) or mixed experimental and qualitative design, and 1 study used a qualitative design. Not included in this review were studies using descriptive or correlational designs, as these designs are not used to examine the effects of an intervention, which was the phenomenon of interest in our review. We also did not include dissertations because they do not meet our criteria of having appeared in a peer-reviewed publication.

Critical Elements for Writing Instruction With Hearing Writers

Based on the reviews and meta-analyses from the three primary sources, we identified the following critical elements for writing instruction among hearing students without disabilities:

Teaching the Process Approach

Research on teaching students to engage in the stages of the writing process—planning, composing, and revising—has shown modest evidence for the effectiveness of the approach with greatest improvements found with explicit instruction on micro-level skills (e.g., spelling, grammar, word choice) and macro-level understanding (e.g., organization, writing conventions, coherence, genre, audience, style; Pritchard & Honeycutt, 2006). The writing process approach also involves providing choice over writing topics and ownership over the product, opportunity to collaborate and share, and a real audience for drafts and completed pieces, and time to engage in planning, composing, and revising.

The difficulty of isolating variables in such a complex process and the uneven definitions of what is meant by time, choice, audience, adherence to steps, and so forth have combined to provide a very mixed picture of effectiveness. According to Pritchard and Honeycutt (2006),

As a result of the complexity of studying writing processes that are so inclusive, multi-layered, and overlapping, few purely experimental studies have been conducted, and fewer yet on a large scale or with the same population over time. Even when variables are highly controlled, researchers in writing concede that their studies cannot account for all the factors that influence the final product. (p. 285)

Pritchard and Honeycutt concluded that the writing process is often poorly implemented and is certainly not a panacea, but it is the best approach currently available. Likewise, Graham and Perin (2007) found few studies using experimental designs in the study of the process writing approach. Of these, explicit teacher training was the most important factor in positive outcomes.

Environmental structuring

One technique for teaching the writing process is referred to as environmental structuring. It encompasses many facets: the participants and their roles in the writing process (e.g., shared vs. independent writing, peer or teacher reviewers), the task (e.g., choosing the writing assignment and intended audience), motivation and self-regulation of the elements of the writing process (e.g., time to engage in planning, composing, and revising), and the writing environment (e.g., a quiet place or medium such as word processing; Graham, 2006b). Although not specifically an approach for teaching process writing, word processing clearly provides greater ease for drafting, revising, and editing when compared with composing manually and, indeed, Graham and Perin (2007) found a moderate positive effect on writing quality. Although environmental structuring is the keystone of the writing process approach, the difficulty of isolating variables in such a complex process and the lack of consistent definitions for terms such as time to write and choice over topics has combined to provide a very mixed picture of effectiveness.

Strategy instruction

Strategy instruction is a specific technique within writing process instruction and is the approach with the largest body of intervention studies. It involves explicit and systematic instruction in planning, composing, revising, and/or editing strategies that the student then uses independently. Findings demonstrate that strategy instruction is highly effective, particularly the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model. SRSD involves teaching students the background knowledge needed to use the strategy successfully, providing explicit description of the strategy, introducing a mnemonic for remembering the steps, discussing its benefits, modeling the strategy, and providing a scaffold for supporting the student’s application of the strategy until mastery and independent use is achieved (Graham, 2006a; Graham & Perin, 2007).

Procedural facilitation

Procedural facilitation involves providing students assistance throughout the phases of the writing process via supports such as graphic organizers, plans of action, grammar and spell checkers, think sheets, and cue cards (Graham, 2006b; MacArthur, 2006). According to Englert, Mariage, and Dunsmore (2006), this technique holds promise, but the body of intervention research is too small to draw implications for practice.

Cognitive apprenticeship and collaborative writing

Cognitive apprenticeship engages students as coparticipants in the writing process. In cognitive apprenticeship, the teacher “steps in” to model, prompt, think aloud, and explain, and “steps back” to allow students to problem solve and make decisions. Englert et al. (2006) found that the body of research was small, but results were promising. For adolescent writers, the technique of collaborative writing involves students in working together as they plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions. Graham and Perin (2007) found a strong positive impact on the quality of compositions when students assist each other.

Community of practice

Community of practice is a technique designed to create opportunities for students to engage with peers in using written language for communicating, expressing feelings, inquiring, imagining, reflecting, and sharing. The technique is typically used within subject areas, such as when students work together to research and construct a paper or presentation on a disciplinary topic. The limited body of research indicates community of practice is a promising technique (Englert et al., 2006).

Prewriting

Prewriting activities engage students in activities, such as reading about a topic or generating a visual representation of ideas, before writing a first draft. The research suggests prewriting has a small to moderate positive impact on the quality of students’ writing (Graham & Perin, 2007).

Instruction on Characteristics of Quality Writing

A number of strategies have been designed to focus students’ attention on specific characteristics of quality writing.

Text structure instruction

Much of the research on text structure involves how children develop knowledge of different genres (e.g., expository or narrative), particularly knowledge of the narrative structure of typical stories for young children. The narrative structure, or story grammar, includes a setting, characters, problem episodes (a series of events/problems and attempts to solve the problem), consequences, and characters’ reactions. According to Donovan and Smolkin (2006), the body of research on teaching practices that support genre knowledge is quite small. It does appear that text structure instruction is most effective in improving writing when students are provided specific models and examples of a given genre as a planning strategy and when teacher feedback focuses on adhering to a particular genre as a revision strategy.

Specific product goals

Specific product goals refer to providing students with supports such as the purpose for the assignment and characteristics of the final product. Graham and Perin (2007) found a strong influence on writing quality when adolescent students were provided with objectives that focused their attention on particular elements of their writing.

Summarization

Summarization involves bringing the important ideas together to make a coherent yet shorter version of the original text. According to Graham and Perin (2007), explicitly teaching adolescents how to summarize has a strong positive effect on their ability to write concise and accurate information.

Sentence combining and grammar instruction

Sentence combining involves teaching students to combine two or more simple sentence structures into a single, more complex, and sophisticated sentence structure. In comparison with traditional grammar instruction, which involves teaching the parts of speech and sentence grammar though techniques such as diagramming sentences, Graham and Perin (2007) found sentence combining had a moderate positive impact on the quality of writing, whereas grammar instruction had a negative impact.

Inquiry activities

Although the most recent studies on inquiry activities are from the mid-1980s, this body of research indicates teaching students to sharpen their inquiry skills by analyzing immediate and concrete data, such as particular objects or actions that the students will write about, improves the quality of writing (Graham & Perin, 2007).

Study of models

The study of models involves providing students with good examples of the type of writing they will do, having them analyze the examples, and asking them to apply the important elements from the examples to their own writing. According to Graham and Perin (2007), the study of models has a positive, though small, effect on the quality of writing.

Writing for Content Learning

Writing for content learning, also referred to as writing-to-learn, is an approach for enhancing the learning of subject matter material rather than an approach for improving the quality of the student’s writing. Studies have shown writing for content learning has a small but significantly positive effect on content learning among middle and high school students and is one of the effective elements for writing instruction found in Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007).

Use of Feedback

According to Beach and Friedrich (2006), the following conclusions appear warranted based on what is currently known about feedback on students’ writing: (a) Students are considerably more likely to engage in revision when teachers respond to their writing with effective feedback; (b) the most effective feedback is specific, descriptive, and nonjudgmental; offers direction for how to improve the writing; builds on the student’s current writing abilities; and takes into account the student’s language skills; (c) written comments are more effective for providing a record of feedback that the student can return to; face-to-face discussions are more effective for elaborating, clarifying, and modeling self-feedback; and online discussions are more effective for promoting revision because the feedback tends to offer the extensiveness of face-to-face discussion but the permanence of written comments that the student can return to when revising; (d) editing feedback is more effective when it includes a combination of student self-correction and teacher correction; (e) feedback is more effective when writing assignments include criteria or rubrics for evaluation and teacher instruction on the criterion categories; and (f) peer feedback in the form of peer conferences is only effective when the teacher dedicates substantial and continuous time to modeling and scaffolding feedback strategies.

Research on Writing Instruction With Deaf Writers

We identified 16 studies of writing instruction with deaf students that met our criteria for inclusion in this review. As Graham and Perin (2007) note “it is difficult to implement the process writing approach” (p. 11) because there is and should be overlap in effective instructional elements. Given the overlap, the determining factor in placing studies in the framework outlined above was the intervention or interventions being investigated, as shown in Table 1. The superscript denotes the fact that we have knowingly listed a study in more than one section of the Table to note the study’s secondary or tertiary aspects.

Table 1.

Framework of Critical Elements for Teaching Writing.

Critical elements	Studies
Teaching the process approach
Environmental structuring	Kluwin and Kelly (1992)
	Mander, Wilton, Townsend, and Thomson (1995)
Strategy instruction
Procedural facilitation	Akamatsu (1988) ^a
	Easterbrooks and Stoner (2006)
	Wolbers (2008a, 2010)^a
	Wolbers, Dostal, and Bowers (2012) ^a
Cognitive apprenticeship/collaborative writing	Wolbers (2008b)
	Wolbers (2008a, 2010)
	Wolbers, Dostal, and Bowers (2012)
Community of practice	Kluwin and Kelly (1992)
Prewriting
Instruction on characteristics of quality writing
Text structure instruction	Akamatsu (1988)
	Cambra (1994)
Specific product goals	Schirmer, Bailey, and Fitzgerald (1999)
Summarization
Sentence combining/grammar instruction	Berent et al. (2007)
	Berent, Kelly, Schmitz, and Kenney (2009)
	Wolbers, Dostal, and Bowers (2012) ^a
Inquiry activities
Study of models	Schirmer, Bailey, and Fitzgerald (1999)
Writing for content learning	Lang and Albertini (2001)
Use of feedback	Kelly et al. (1994)
	Kluwin and Kelly (1992) ^a
	Schirmer, Bailey, and Fitzgerald (1999) ^a
	Schirmer and Ingram (2003)
	Wray, Hazlett, and Flexer (1988)

Secondary focus.

Also of note, Wolbers (2008a, 2010) published two articles on what appears to be facets of one study. Although we provide both reference citations, we count these works as one study in this review. Three studies we included investigated writing in college-age students (Berent et al., 2007; Berent, Kelly, Schmitz, & Kenney, 2009; Wray, Hazlett, & Flexer, 1988). Because the approach used by Wray et al. (1988) was similar to that used with kindergarten through Grade 12 students and due to the fact that the focus of both studies by Berent and colleagues (2007, 2009) was on material typically covered in elementary or middle schools, we have included studies of college-age students in this review. As noted above, given the lack of a schema for considering writing instruction, our goal is to be as inclusive as possible so as to best understand what research tells us about teaching writing to deaf students.

As indicated in Table 1, no research with deaf students has been conducted within several constructs of the framework. This includes strategy instruction, prewriting, summarization, inquiry activities, and study of models.

Teaching the Process Approach

Environmental structuring

Kluwin and Kelly (1992) conducted a single-group experimental study over a period of 2 years in which they specifically looked at the process writing approach. Participants included 52 teachers of deaf students in Grades 4 to 10 from 10 school districts, who were trained in using the writing process approach. The 1st-year training workshop focused on why process writing instruction is important, how to teach writing as a process, and how dialogue journals fit into a process writing approach. The 2nd-year training workshop was designed to help the teachers refine the goals for their writing program, identify criteria for selecting writing topics, and provide effective feedback.

To assess the effectiveness of the intervention, two types of data were gathered: (a) pre- and postintervention, the students were asked to complete three writing tasks, and (b) the teachers were asked to keep logs of how much writing the students did and the proportion of class time the teachers dedicated to writing instruction. Given that there was no comparison group that did not receive the intervention, Kluwin and Kelly (1992) compared improvements in the students’ writing to what would be expected based on normal growth during a 2-year period. Analysis of the teachers’ logs showed incomplete teaching of all phases of the writing process with 60% of the teachers including all phases (i.e., prewriting, writing, revising, and publishing) in their instruction, 30% omitting the publishing phase, and 8% omitting the revising and publishing phases. These teachers, like teachers studied by Pritchard and Honeycutt (2006), seem to implement the writing process approach incompletely. Nevertheless, based on holistic measures and on assessment of increasing grammatical complexities, Kluwin and Kelly’s (1992) data suggest that use of the writing process approach improved the writing of the participants beyond that which would be expected based on maturation.

The second study specifically investigated the effect of word processing on writing. Mander, Wilton, Townsend, and Thomson (1995) used a single-participant, multiple-baseline design with a convenience sample of two intact classes to investigate the effect of word processing on the quality of written compositions of 13 deaf 7- and 8-year-old students being taught with a process writing approach. Writing samples were gathered from each participant at 3 points in time—one after 8 weeks of baseline, one after 12 weeks of writing process instruction with Group 1 creating compositions on the computer and Group 2 with paper and pencil, and one after another 12 weeks of process writing instruction with both groups creating compositions on the computer.

Based on analysis of what the authors referred to as a holistic rubric, analysis of linguistic structures, and total word count, the researchers found improvement in organization, word choice, consistency of grammar, and use of punctuation in the word processing condition for both groups. Group 1 demonstrated greatest improvement during the first 12 weeks of computer use, which the researchers attributed to nonequivalence between the low and high ends of the assessment scales and lack of change in teacher feedback as the students’ writing improved. The ubiquity of word processing today has made it a given that computers are used in the writing environment, so in that regard, the findings about teachers’ instructional feedback not being responsive to changes in the students’ writing is more pertinent than the simple use of word processing versus paper and pencil.

Procedural facilitation

Using a single-participant design, Easterbrooks and Stoner (2006) examined the effectiveness of using a visual tool to increase the number of adjectives used in the writing of three high school deaf students. They found that although the number of adjectives increased, the inclusion of story grammar elements and description of action declined. The authors do not indicate why these particular students were selected as participants and only note that the criterion for participation was the students’ ability to respond to a prompt by writing five sentences containing a noun and a verb. No other information is given to indicate whether these students were typical of other high school deaf students.

Given the minimal standard of writing used as a measure for a participant’s inclusion in Easterbrooks and Stoner (2006) study, it seems difficult to generalize the findings to other students in their final years of high school. It is possible that more accomplished deaf writers, similar to better hearing writers, would have known more about writing (Graham, 2006b) and would have had more automatic procedures and strategies for writing texts (Pritchard & Honeycutt, 2006), thereby being able to use the visual tool to facilitate the use of one facet of writing while maintaining skills in other areas. Easterbrooks and Stoner themselves struggle with their findings, suggesting that there may be a developmental progression in which the old skills reestablish once the new skills are integrated.

Cognitive apprenticeship and collaborative writing

The heart of cognitive apprenticeship is that through instructional discourse and teacher think alouds (i.e., the teacher problem solves aloud while completing a writing task), the children attain insights about the writing process and how to create quality finished compositions. Wolbers (2008b) conducted a single-group experimental investigation on the effectiveness of an approach called “morning message” in which teachers and students engage in discourse about a text that they are collaboratively writing. This text is recursively revised and discussed as new content is added. Once completed, the text is read and reread to help the students feel comfortable with the rhythm and pattern of written language. Wolbers modified the approach to include an ASL notation of student contributions to the text, which is translated word for word into written English as a result of teacher–student discourse. The result may not be grammatically correct but is an approximation of English. Participants included one middle school and two elementary classroom teachers and their 16 deaf students. The intervention lasted 21 days. Pre- and post intervention, three assessments were administered—writing task, standardized reading test, and revising/editing task. The students showed significant improvements in use of story structure, contextual language, editing/revising skills, and word identification but no improvement in incorporation of writing conventions and total word count.

Wolbers (2008a, 2010) then conducted a single-group experimental investigation on a modification of the morning message approach that she termed strategic and interactive writing intervention or SIWI by adding two components. The first is the mnemonic POSTER (plan, organize, scribe, translate, edit, revise) as a procedural facilitator to assist the students during each point of the writing process. The second is NIP-it (notice, instruct, and practice) lessons, which are designed to ensure that the teacher introduces more advanced concepts to spur continuous writing development in the students. In NIP-it lessons, the teacher notices what is missing in student writing, provides direct and explicit instruction in the needed area, and then has the students practice in the context of a guided writing activity. Participants included two teachers of the deaf, one from a school for the deaf and one from a center-based program housed in a public school, and their 33 middle school students, of whom 16 were assigned to the treatment and 17 to the comparison group. The intervention lasted 8 weeks. Based on analysis of pre- and postintervention writing samples, a pre- and postprobe that assessed generalization to personal narrative and personal experience types of writing, videotapes of instruction, and teacher reflections, Wolbers found that the intervention was effective in increasing the length of student writing and students’ incorporation of primary traits, contextual language, and conventions in their compositions. She concluded that the approach is effective in increasing both micro- and macro-level skills; however, the person implementing the intervention was highly skilled in the instructional strategy, and similar results may not be achieved by others.

Wolbers, Dostal, and Bowers (2012) expanded on the previous SIWI investigations in a year-long single-group experimental study of one middle school teacher and 29 sixth- to eighth-grade students at a school for the deaf. The students were classified for the study in two ways: (a) low- or high-achieving students as indicated by the teacher’s language and writing objectives for each student and (b) expressive language: severely language delayed, ASL, English-based sign, sign-supported speech, and contact sign with ASL tendencies (students who were not clearly users of ASL or English-based sign). The teacher implemented 45-min SIWI instructional sessions with personal narrative, narrative, expository, and persuasive writing for 3 to 4 times each week. As new writing skills were introduced, the classes were lead through guided, shared, and independent writing via the SIWI approach. Personal narratives collected at the beginning, middle, and end of the year were analyzed for length, sentence complexity, sentence awareness, and function words. The researchers found that the students made significant gains in the length, complexity, and grammatical accuracy of their writing. These improvements were found in both the low- and high-achieving groups of students and were independent of beginning literacy levels and language group. The researchers concluded the SIWI intervention is appropriate for students across ability and communication levels. Although the approach was effective for teaching some grammatical features, it was not effective for all features or equally as beneficial to each language group.

Community of practice

Over the course of an academic year, Kluwin and Kelly (1991) created a community of writers by pairing 204 deaf students with similarly aged hearing peers in Grades 4 to 12. The pairs of students wrote to each other through dialogue journals in which they were expected to share interests, feelings, ideas, and experiences. The teachers’ role was to encourage students to write, provide time for writing, and send the journals back and forth. After one school year, the journal entries of 153 of the deaf students were analyzed for syntax and content. Results indicated that improvement in the quality of the deaf students’ writing was related to the relationship between pairs, and key to this relationship was duration and interest in each other. Furthermore, deaf writers who began the partnership with the ability to construct more complex sentences maintained longer relationships with their respective partners and gained more syntactic abilities than other participants.

Summary of findings

The research on writing process teaching with deaf students includes a variety of techniques found to be effective in teaching writing to hearing students. The studies of environmental structuring and word processing are dated in terms of the strategies they use (Kluwin & Kelly, 1992; Mander et al., 1995) and though are historically interesting offer little in the way of implications for practice today when the writing process approach is widely known and word processing is a given. The one study of community of practice in which dialogue journals are shared between pairs of hearing and deaf students (Kluwin & Kelly, 1991) is also dated (though potentially could be updated with the more current technology of email, blogs, wikis, etc.), although results were modest and it is not possible to know how much of the writing improvement was due to the dialogue journal activity and how much was due to classroom instruction. Easterbrooks and Stoner’s (2006) study of a procedural facilitation tool suggests promising results for improvement in writing. Of all of the writing process studies, the studies of the SIWI cognitive apprenticeship approach conducted by Wolbers (2008a, 2008b, 2010) and Wolbers et al. (2012) offer the most compelling evidence for effectiveness.

Instruction on Characteristics of Quality Writing

Text structure instruction

Using a single-participant design, Akamatsu (1988) taught narrative story structure using texts on a first- to third-grade level to two students, ages 11 and 12. Both students had profound hearing losses and used ASL in their mainstream educational program. During baseline, the students wrote summaries of brief story passages they read. During 3 weeks of intervention, the students read stories, answered questions that focused on story structure elements, and wrote summaries of the stories with the aid of a guide displayed on a chart. The first student included all six story grammar elements in her written summaries in most but not all sessions. The second student included five to six elements throughout intervention. Performance during maintenance showed a similar pattern with the first student including three and six elements and the second student including all six elements in both sessions. Akamatsu acknowledges that the intervention did not enable the students to internalize story structure. It is possible that the intervention was too brief or not taught explicitly enough. It is also possible that baseline did not provide true preintervention performance given that the first student had only two baseline sessions (three baseline sessions are considered minimal for reliability) and baseline for the second student did not show consistency of performance (required for reliability).

During a 12-week intervention period, Cambra (1994) used a variety of activities for teaching 11- to 14-year-old deaf students about narrative story structure. These activities did not involve actually writing texts, though the researchers state some writing strategies, which were not specified, were used. The 10 students were given an identical pre- and postintervention measure in which they were asked to convert a descriptive passage to a narrative text, sequence a narrative, and summarize a narrative. Simple descriptive statistics indicated 4 of the students used story grammar components in organizing their narrative in the pretest, 6 of the students used story structure components in the posttest, and 4 students never incorporated story structure components. Given that the intervention did not involve having the participants write texts, it is difficult to draw implications as to whether the participants would spontaneously use what they learned about text structure in their writing.

Specific product goals

Schirmer, Bailey, and Fitzgerald (1999) conducted a mixed methods study with four students in Grade 5 and six students in Grade 7 at a state school for the deaf to determine whether teaching the qualities of writing reflected in a writing assessment rubric would improve the students’ writing. The assessment rubric served as the product goal, rather than the study of example compositions. After teaching each trait on the rubric, the classroom teacher assessed the students’ completed compositions using the rubric and provided these assessments as a learning tool to the students. Quantitative analysis involved comparing independent ratings of one composition completed in October and one completed in March for each student. Results showed that use of the rubric as a teaching strategy improved four traits of writing for all the students—topic, content, story development, and organization. However, the strategy did not improve their performance on five traits—text structure, voice/audience, word choice, sentence structures, and mechanics. Qualitative analysis involved a content analysis of all compositions completed during the school year. Results indicated that the personal function of expressing emotions appears most frequently in the students’ early compositions, whereas the heuristic function of problem solving, imaginative function of storytelling, and informative function of describing and discussing cause/effect appears most frequently in their mid–late compositions. The authors suggest that as the students engaged in more writing, they abandoned the function of simply expressing their emotions and engaged more often in using writing to problem solve, create imaginative stories, and give information to the reader.

Sentence combining and grammar instruction

Although we found no studies of sentence combining, we did find two studies in which grammar instruction was delivered within the context of texts written by deaf college students. The second of these studies (Berent et al., 2009) was a replication and extension of the first (Berent et al., 2007). Participants in both studies were convenience samples of college students enrolled in a 10-week remedial English class with an established curriculum focusing on nine grammatical forms mainly related to verb constructions (e.g., tense, aspect, infinitives, modals). Berent et al. (2007) used focus-on-form methods, instructional techniques that visually made salient the nine forms. Twenty-four participants participated in the Input condition and 18 in the Dictogloss condition. Two interventions were provided to both the experimental groups: (a) textual enhancement of target grammatical forms in assigned reading and (b) coding of the students’ first essay showing correct and incorrect use of target grammatical forms. That is, in both these conditions, participants read passages that had the grammatical targets enhanced so that participants would attend to the target formations, and each participant’s baseline essay was also enhanced and returned. A third intervention was provided to the Dictogloss group. Short paragraphs visually displayed through projection on a screen served as visual dictation of passages containing target grammatical forms. After a passage was displayed long enough for students to read it 3 or 4 times, the students worked in groups of three to recreate the passage using the targeted form. The study also included a control group of 26 participants who received the traditional class instruction (e.g., drill and practice) without any visual enhancements. As measured on a postintervention writing assignment, both experimental groups demonstrated significant improvement in the writing of the nine target forms whereas the control group did not.

Thirty-four participants participated in a replication study (Berent et al., 2009). In both the experimental and control conditions, participants wrote an essay that they were asked to revise. The experimental group received their first draft back with visual enhancements of the nine target forms: Correct productions were labeled by grammar formulation and preceded with a plus sign. Incorrect productions were also labeled but preceded with a minus sign. Participants in the experimental group were told to use their correct productions as models for revising their incorrect productions. The control group also revised their first drafts but did not receive any visual enhancements. During the 10-week period, students wrote and revised three essays. The analysis of the participants’ first and last essays demonstrated that the experimental group had made significant improvement in the use of the target grammatical structures whereas the control group had not. Five and a half months after the last essay written in the class, students were invited and paid to write another essay. In comparing the last class essay to the delayed text, participants who had been in the experimental condition demonstrated only a little reduction in their knowledge. The delayed essay remained significantly better than the first essay.

The authors conclude that essay enhancement of a participant’s own text is efficacious because students are noticing and acting on features within a text that they comprehend so that attention can in fact be focused on the grammaticality. The authors also note that it is likely important that these grammatical features be a priori familiar to the participants rather than new. Such prior knowledge, even if incomplete, is essential to the participant’s ability to go through the stages of noticing, processing, and acquiring the formations.

Summary of findings

The two studies on text structure instruction provide no evidence for the effectiveness of explicitly teaching story grammar components as a means for improving writing. The one study on using an assessment rubric as a model of quality writing indicates promise of the approach in improving some aspects of writing performance. Embedded study of grammar via visual enhancement however provides compelling evidence of student learning (Berent et al., 2007; Berent et al., 2009), though, as the researchers note, their research was not designed to investigate the “overall quality or communicative effectiveness of the participants’ written English discourse” (Berent et al., 2009, p. 200) though improvements in grammar do improve the quality of a text.

Writing for Content Learning

In a qualitative study of how students construct meaning and gain understanding of science concepts through writing, Lang and Albertini (2001) provided training to 234 teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students on teaching science and English literacy. As part of this training, the teachers were taught to use four types of writing-to-learn activities—creative (e.g., the students imagine they are an object or living organism and write about the experience), guided free writing (e.g., the teacher provides specific steps that the students follow in writing about an experiment), end-of-class reflection (e.g., students write their thoughts about a class session they just experienced), and double entry (e.g., students copy a paragraph or part of a paragraph and write their reactions on the facing page of their personal journals). The researchers examined 228 writing samples of students in Grades 6 to 11 and teachers’ written commentaries from 12 of the 234 teachers in the original group. Both the students’ writing and teachers’ commentaries were analyzed to determine the kinds of science knowledge being exhibited in student writing and the factors that maximize writing-to-learn assignments.

Lang and Albertini (2011) found both advantages and drawbacks for each of the four writing activities, with no obvious benefit for any one of them in assisting the students’ learning of the science concepts. The teachers believed the creative and double entry activities were most effective in helping them assess student learning.

Specifically in regard to writing, Lang and Albertini (2001) note that the creative texts were generally longer than other types of texts examined and were favored by the teachers. Students were more likely to use literary devices and to voice their individual perspectives in these pieces. Students wrote the shortest texts when asked to write end-of-class notes. Longer texts written in creative pieces and in the double entry assignments were more likely to include sophisticated language devices and to demonstrate understanding of science concepts.

Use of Feedback

Schirmer and Ingram (2003) conducted a single-participant study designed to investigate the effectiveness of the conversational technique of recasting, which has been used to model and facilitate the development of face-to-face conversational language, in an online chat environment to promote written language development. Middle school hearing students at one site were paired with deaf students at another site and met daily to discuss an astronomy topic. In the instructional intervention, one of the investigators joined the discussion as the online teacher to recast the deaf students’ written language using language structures that were not appearing consistently in their spontaneous writing. In the first experiment, three pairs of students chatted for 10 min daily for 3 weeks. Each pair was a high school deaf student (from a state school for the deaf) and middle school hearing student. For this experiment, the dependent variable was the number of descriptors in the deaf students’ written language. For the one dyad that completed the first experiment, results showed that the intervention was effective. In the second experiment, four pairs of students chatted for 15 min daily for 4 weeks. Each pair was a middle school deaf student (from a public school resource room) and middle school hearing student. For this experiment, the dependent variable was the number of conjunctions in the deaf students’ written language. Results showed no effect of the intervention.

Kelly et al. (1994) conducted a single-group experimental study to determine the effects of personal captioning on the writing development of 8- to 12-year deaf students. During a 2-year period, each of the 18 participants captioned 36 videotapes of folk tales signed in ASL, each of which was approximately 90 s in length. The students were expected to use written English and were not provided with adult assistance during the captioning session except for help with the technology and questions about vocabulary in ASL or English. A day or more after the captioning session, the students received individual feedback in a 40-min session in which the instructor focused on syntactic, semantic, and vocabulary errors. The students did not revise or edit work on which they received feedback; rather, the researchers assumed that feedback would be incorporated into the captioning of new videotapes. Analysis of total word count, use of specific syntactic forms, and grammatical errors indicated that students wrote longer texts and showed growth in grammatical knowledge. However, the design of the study did not enable the researchers to determine the extent to which the results were due to the captioning activity and/or the feedback rather than to variables such as other educational activities and maturation.

In working with two oral deaf college students, each 21 years of age, Wray et al. (1988) used a process writing approach with a focus on conferencing for providing feedback. After the students developed a first draft version, the instructor provided feedback on the need for more information, clarification, or focus. The instructor also asked questions to help the student focus on ideas, sentence fluency, audience, and organization. The students then revised and edited their work, and also read their various drafts orally as a strategy for determining needed revisions. While writing the final version, the students were instructed to listen to themselves when orally reading to help recognize where conventional punctuation should be placed. The researchers compared the number of errors in the first draft with the number of errors in the final draft. Although emphasis during the conferencing stage was placed on revision of higher order writing skills, the compositions were analyzed for editing issues (i.e., spelling, word misusage, punctuation, word omissions, verb tense, and pluralization). Descriptive analysis revealed that the number of errors decreased from first to final draft for each composition; however, no other measures of quality were considered. So although the writing appears to have improved from first to final draft, there is no evidence that the feedback was responsible for the improvement.

Summary of findings

Of the four studies on the effects of feedback on writing improvement, two of the studies examined conferencing as a form of feedback (Kelly et al., 1994; Wray et al., 1988), one examined recasting as a form of feedback (Schirmer & Ingram, 2003), one used an assessment rubric for feedback (Schirmer et al., 1999), and the fourth did not specify how feedback was provided (Kluwin & Kelly, 1992). Conferencing was found to improve micro-level skills and recasting was found to be effective for only one participant.

Methodological Considerations

In considering the methodological issues in the research on writing instruction with deaf students, the first obvious issue is the small body of research. We were able to identify just 16 intervention studies in a 25-year period of time. However, perhaps as dismaying, is that this small body of research is also quite dated with almost 50% of the studies published more than 15 years ago. Types of methodologies reflect the era of many of the studies. There are no random control trials, which are currently considered the strongest design for making causal claims between an intervention and its outcomes. Seven of the studies used single-group experimental design, which is sometimes described as preexperimental because the lack of a comparison group diminishes the ability to eliminate intervening variables that can affect outcomes. Four of the studies used single-participant design, which is considered a rigorous experimental design from which causation can be shown but only with replications. Only the Schirmer and Ingram (2003) study, and Berent et al. (2007) and Berent et al. (2009) included a replication. One study used only a qualitative design, which can offer important contextual information about instruction but is not well suited for identifying effectiveness.

Another issue is that components of writing instruction found to be important in hearing students have either not been addressed or only addressed with one or two studies with deaf students. There is no research, for example, on strategy instruction. Yet of all the components of writing instruction, strategy instruction has received the greatest attention and is the only component for which there is substantial evidence for effectiveness with hearing writers. Half of the writing intervention research has been conducted on just two components, cognitive apprenticeship and feedback, and all studies on cognitive apprenticeship were conducted by a single researcher.

Expertise of the individual carrying out the intervention appears to be an issue in all of the studies. None of the authors discuss treatment fidelity and most do not describe the teachers’ knowledge of the interventions and skill in carrying them out. However, even with the limited information provided, it seems that stronger findings were found in studies in which the teachers had training and ongoing contact with an expert in the intervention technique (e.g., Berent et al., 2007; Berent et al., 2009; Wolbers, 2008b).

Yet another issue is the lack of follow-up investigations. Only Wolbers’ (2008a, 2010) and Wolbers, Dostal, & Bowers’ (2012) research on SIWI; Berent et al.’s (2007) and Berent et al.’s (2009) investigations of visual enhancement of grammatical features; and the Schirmer and Ingram’s (2003) study on recasting could be described as a line of inquiry. Although Kluwin and Kelly published two studies together and Schirmer published two studies with different colleagues, the instructional interventions they investigated did not follow from one study to the next; that is, there was no replication study or development of a new study based on findings from the previous study. The corpus of research, thus, appears to be fragmented and does not build a body of knowledge about effective writing instruction with deaf students.

A final issue centers on the chronological age of the participants, the writing maturity of the participants, and the related metacognitive knowledge about writing that the participants might have. Easterbrooks and Stoner (2006) worked with 17- to 18-year-olds who only had to be able to write five sentences in response to an age-appropriate picture for inclusion in the study. Wray et al. (1988) also investigated how to improve the writing of older deaf students, yet no information about either the writing maturity or metacognition about writing is provided. Participants in Berent et al. (2007) and Berent et al. (2009) were college-age students who were required to take a remedial English grammar course. Such a necessity speaks to their possible immaturity in writing skills. Participants in the other studies we reviewed included elementary and middle school–age deaf students, mainly from the convenience samples of participating teachers’ classrooms, again without information on the participants’ writing ability or knowledge.

Although not a limiting consideration, it is important to note that six authors account for a significant contribution to the research on writing instruction with deaf students. Each has conducted two or more studies: Berent, Kelly, Kluwin, Schmitz, Schirmer, and Wolbers.

Discussion

We began this study by examining the research on writing instruction with students without disabilities for two reasons. One was to develop a framework by which we could situate the body of research on writing instruction with deaf students. The other was to summarize findings from this broader body of research to which we could compare what we learned about teaching writing to deaf students. We then conducted a comprehensive, synthetic review of the research on writing instruction with deaf students in preschool through college.

The research on approaches for teaching writing to hearing students fell into four categories: teaching the process approach, instruction on characteristics of quality writing, writing for content learning, and feedback. We found that each of the studies on teaching writing to deaf students fell into one of these categories. Outcomes were equivocal, and the evidence for practice is at best promising.

Given the few studies conducted on any given approach with deaf students, the lack of follow-up and replication studies, and the weaknesses in most of the methodological designs, we can only suggest that a few of the approaches are promising. One is the collaborative writing approach that Wolbers (2008a, 2008b, 2010) and Wolbers et al. (2012) studied. Cautious recommendation to use the teacher–student discourse during shared composing and revising seem warranted based on her findings. Another is the use of a support tool during the writing process, which was used with some success in the Easterbrooks and Stoner’s (2006) and Schirmer et al.’s (1999) studies, and in the SIWI studies by Wolbers. Although no specific tool or technique for using the tool stands out as optimal in any of these studies, findings indicate that the use of some type of tool would be productive for improving the writing performance of deaf students. Finally, the contextualized study of grammar, that is, instruction given within the context of student-generated text, yields positive results. Although correct grammar is not synonymous with effective writing, the technique of embedding grammar instruction within a student’s text seems a promising avenue for bettering the student’s overall writing.

It is much easier to identify implications for further research than implications for practice. All of the techniques involved in writing process teaching should receive attention, but we would argue that this is as true for the broader population of hearing students as it is for deaf students. Environmental structuring is really the heart of the writing process approach, though it is difficult to study given the interrelatedness of its components. As noted earlier, the writing process is all too often incompletely and ineffectually implemented. As teacher training and knowledge seem to be the determining factor for successful implementation (Graham & Perin, 2007), this would seem to be an area worthy of future research.

The other techniques in the writing process approach are somewhat more amenable to methodological designs that enable researchers to draw connections between the intervention and the results. Given the substantial body of research on strategy instruction and the SRSD model specifically, it certainly should be investigated with deaf students. The limited body of research with hearing students on procedural facilitation, cognitive apprenticeship/collaborative writing, community of practice, and prewriting suggests promise for deaf students, and, indeed, the few studies of some of these techniques indicate they should be further investigated but using more rigorous methodological designs (i.e., randomized control trial at best, quasi-experimental if random assignment is not feasible, or single-participant experimental design) and with diverse groups of deaf students.

The research on text structure instruction for improving writing with hearing and deaf children is small, though that with hearing students points to the value of further study on the possible advantages of teaching models of different genres, presenting examples of these genres, and providing targeted feedback on the particular genres the students are using in their compositions during the revision phase. Studies on other approaches for teaching the characteristics of quality writing to hearing writers indicate that similar studies with deaf writers would be valuable.

Writing in the content areas would appear to offer a rich opportunity to use writing in ways that are unique to subject area instruction. Investigating strategies that are most effective in teaching deaf students to use writing for persuading, conveying knowledge, transmitting information, and other such functions would be extremely worthwhile.

It is intuitively logical that feedback is crucial to improvement in writing performance, and so research on the qualities of effective feedback would be valuable. As the research on providing feedback to hearing students has not been helpful in identifying these qualities (rather, findings have shown what not to do vs. what to do in providing feedback) and the very limited research on providing feedback to deaf students indicates that conferencing can be useful in improving micro-level skills, research on feedback techniques is clearly needed.

We would also note that the methodological considerations we identified in the research on writing instruction with deaf students may also be considerations in the research on writing instruction with hearing students. It would seem worthwhile for future researchers to take into account issues including expertise of the individual carrying out the intervention, treatment fidelity, writing maturity of the participants, and replication in designing new studies.

Conclusion

The purpose of this review of the research was to assess the evidence base for current approaches to writing instruction with deaf students and to compare results with the body of research on hearing writers without disabilities. We learned that the base is small and fragmented. We also learned that the research on writing instruction with hearing students is relatively small, and guidance for educational practice is based on a relatively limited body of findings. It is clear that rigorous research is acutely needed on all writers, but certainly on deaf students who struggle with literacy, so that writing instruction can be better informed by research findings.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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