Publications
Publication details [#48392]
Volterra, Virginia, Maria Cristina Caselli, Barbara Ardito and Angela Vecchietti. 2008. Deaf and hearing children: Reading together in preschool. In Morales-López, Esperanza and Carolina Plaza-Pust, eds. Sign Bilingualism. Language development, interaction, and maintenance in sign language contact situations. (Studies in bilingualism 38). John Benjamins. pp. 137–164.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
The present paper describes an educational experience carried out within the project “Bilingual education towards deaf and hearing children’s integration”. The conceptual framework of the project refers to a bilingual approach which consists in exposing deaf and hearing kindergarten children to both sign language and spoken language. Deaf teachers used Italian Sign Language while hearing teachers used Italian and Signed Italian. The educational activities, briefly described, aimed to introduce preschoolers to early literacy within the theoretical approach developed by Ferreiro and Teberosky. Twelve children (five hearing and seven deaf) took part in the experience and their levels of conceptualization of written language were evaluated at the beginning and at the end of the school year.