Reading and Dyslexia in Deaf Children

Many deaf children have reading difficulties but there are no reading tests designed specially for deaf children.

Research at City University London will produce scores for deaf children in Year 6 on a number of deaf-friendly reading tests.

This will hopefully be the first step in developing a standardised reading test for deaf children which teachers may use in the future to check on the reading progress of deaf children in their class.

As part of the same project, they are investigating dyslexia in deaf children which is currently difficult for teachers to spot.

This means that deaf children with dyslexia are not identified and cannot benefit from the specialist help that other dyslexic children receive.

The first stage has focused on the reading skills of deaf children who use spoken language.

The next stage of the research will look at deaf children who use British Sign Language (BSL) to communicate.

There is no written form of BSL and so deaf signers face completely different challenges when learning to read English.

Children and families who take part in the project will be contributing to a bank of data which we hope will help deaf children in the future receive the help they need at school.

Participants will also be provided with a summary of the project's overall findings at the end of the study.

The project is being run by Ros Herman, Penny Roy, Fiona Kyle and Catherine Barnett with funding from the Nuffield Foundation.