Graduate School of Education

These three qualitative studies describe and analyze how and when young dyslexic people manage disability labels in talk. The theoretical framework informing this study includes post-structuralist approaches to analyzing talk about disability (Tremain, 2002, 2006; Goodley, 2011) and on-going debates about using discourses to model the relationship between impairment, disability and culture inside and outside social model of disability (Hughes & Paterson, 1997; Corker, 1998; Allan, 1999; Shakespeare, 2000; Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Grue, 2011) and resistance against ableism generally (Gabel & Peters, 2004). The research design involved semi-structured interviews of twenty-six students with dyslexia (Seidman, 2006) who attended a specialized high school and a review of three documentary films. The three articles detail different approaches to the same phenomenon of navigating and describing dyslexia. The first article engages a primary analysis of how new discourses of the gifted dyslexic brain include persisting notions of a broken brain using Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) in educational documentary film. The second study reframes existing studies of conceptual metaphor among dyslexics moving discussion beyond dyslexia as a barrier to a dynamic range of metaphors including dyslexia as a journey, puzzle and even as existence. Contemporary studies of conceptual metaphor and disability continue to reveal how disabled students navigate the differences between impairment and disability. The third article relates long-standing theories of learning differences to the lack of claiming disability among dyslexic students. By exploring passing as able-bodied as a phenomenon, I theorize how schools, even specialized settings, as ableist institutions oppress, silence and foreclose the possibilities of group identity. This research contributes to discursive approaches to understanding dyslexia as disability and connects disabled identities in talk to work with dyslexic students in schools. Suggestions for future research include understanding neurodiversity movements in relationship to learning disabilities, continuing to examine conceptual metaphor use among dyslexics to build out a typology and the political and economic roots of the discourses of learning differently.

Research has found that, on average, deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students graduate from high school reading at the fourth grade level (Allen, 1986). Additionally, DHH children of deaf parents (Charrow & Fletcher, 1974) and those with strong American Sign Language (ASL) proficiency (Strong & Prinz, 1997) tend to outperform DHH students without parents who are proficient in ASL. The Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986) suggests that reading comprehension is a product of decoding and language proficiency. Many DHH students have limited auditory access, and may struggle to acquire English, especially the more demanding academic English characteristics of school texts (Mayer & Wells, 1996). Academic English has been identified as a strong predictor of reading comprehension among hearing children (Uccelli et al., 2015). Guided by a modified SVR model, in this study I investigate DHH secondary school students’ reading comprehension as predicted by receptive ASL proficiency, word reading fluency/decoding, and academic English proficiency. Guided by prior research on DHH and hearing students, I investigate the hypothesis that for secondary school DHH students enrolled in ASL/English bilingual/bimodal schools for the deaf, academic English proficiency is a significant predictor of reading comprehension alongside ASL proficiency. In this study, a sample of secondary school DHH students were tested in ASL proficiency, academic English proficiency, word reading fluency (a proxy for decoding), and reading comprehension. Using linear regression, an interaction between academic English proficiency and word reading fluency was detected, such that the lower the level of academic English proficiency, the higher the impact of word reading fluency on reading comprehension. ASL skills predicted reading comprehension across all models. Findings support a model in which socio-demographic factors, ASL proficiency, and word reading fluency are predictors of reading comprehension for secondary DHH students. This study is innovative in assessing three sets of language and reading skills essential for DHH students’ reading comprehension. The continued adaptation of instruments that target these constructs, as well as studies with larger samples, are critical to further explore the innovative theoretical model of reading comprehension for DHH students proposed in this study.