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Writing Profiles of Deaf Children

Taught through British Sign

Language

DIANA BURMAN, TEREZINHA NUNES and DEBORAH EVANS,

University of Oxford, Department of Educational Studies, Oxford, UK

ABSTRACT

Congenitally, profoundly deaf children whose first language is British Sign Language(BSL) and whose speech is largely unintelligible need to be literate to communicateeffectively in a hearing society. Both spelling and writing skills of such children canbe limited, to the extent that no currently available assessment method offers an ade-quate appraisal of their competence. Our aim was to create such an instrument to

aid assessment and to support teachers in setting objectives for their deaf students’writing development.Writing samples describing the same four-picture story were collected from 29

congenitally, profoundly deaf 10-year-old users of BSL. Six experienced teachers ofthe deaf ranked their writing productions in five levels; the correlations between theirranks were high and significant. This indicates that the children’s texts were classifiedreliably into categories, which could then be used for further descriptive analysis. Thetexts in each category were analysed qualitatively to provide descriptive profiles foreach level. An indication of the concurrent validity of the profiles was obtained

through significant correlations with reading comprehension measures. Future researchshould ascertain further the reliability and validity of this instrument and its usefulnessin setting goals for improving deaf children’s writing ability. Copyright © 2006 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd.

Key words: congenitally; profoundly deaf; pre-lingually; British Sign Lan-guage; writing assessments; English literacy

INTRODUCTION

Assessment is crucial to the design and evaluation of educational programmesf th d i f ff ti E li h lit t hi f d f hild A j

Deafness and Education International

Deafness Educ. Int. 9(1): 2–23 (2007)

Published online 28 November 2006 in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/dei.204

2



Writing profiles 3

presently no instruments to assist teachers in assessing the writing of literacylearners who are congenitally and profoundly deaf and are taught primarilythrough British Sign Language (BSL; see Powers and Gregory, 1998). Previous

attempts in achieving this goal have included the adaptation of instructions ofassessments designed for hearing children so that they can be presented to deafchildren (Tymms et al., 2003) and the development of measures appropriatefor deaf children who have made considerable progress in writing (Isaacson,1996; Heefner and Shaw, 1996; Gormley and Sarachan-Deily, 1987). Our goalwas to develop a descriptive measure of the writing ability displayed by deafchildren who have not yet made great progress in writing in order to help defineaims for their instruction in writing English.

Deaf students’ writing performance and difficulties

Past research shows that prelingually, profoundly deaf children can learn tospeak but they do not usually attain similar levels of competence in the writtenas in the oral form of the language they learned (e.g. Bishop, 1982; Gillam and

Johnston, 1992; Taeschner et al., 1988; Kelly and Whitehead, 1983). Theyproduce more mistakes when writing a story than when telling it orally; thisdifference is observed even when the language sample is elicited throughexperimental tasks (Geers and Moog, 1978).

In comparison to hearing peers, deaf students’ produce shorter sentences,avoid complex syntactic structures, use a more restricted vocabulary, often omitfunction words (e.g. articles and prepositions) as well as use more of these thannecessary on some occasions, and can also omit major constituents of the sen-tence (e.g. the verb ‘to be’ or auxiliary verbs) and use inappropriate word order(Volterra and Bates, 1989; McAffee et al., 1990). Such errors were observedin the spontaneous writing of post-secondary students who had intelligiblespeech and were, therefore, highly successful oral language learners. They hadthe possibility of using oral language to plan their writing (for the significance

of oral inner speech in planning writing, see Mayer and Wells, 1996) but theycould not attain in writing the same level of performance in the use of grammarand morphology that they attained in oral speech.

Studies about the writing of orally educated secondary school deaf students’provide a basis for teachers of adolescents and college students to design appro-priate instruction (e.g. Taeschner et al., 1988; McAffee et al., 1990; Tur-Kaspaand Dromi, 2001). In contrast, there is virtually no research on the writingability of primary school students educated in BSL. There is accumulatingevidence that profoundly deaf children exposed to a signed language learn sign

language as efficiently as hearing children learn an oral language (Goldin-Meadow, 2003). There is also evidence that deaf children are able to think in

i l t l d (Kli d B ll i 1979) d th i l



Burman et al.4

tion is required from BSL to English for the children’s writing to be read by areader unfamiliar with BSL. Because BSL and English are different languages,using BSL to plan a piece of written English may show positive transfer as well

as interference (Mayer and Wells, 1996). For example, positive transfer mightbe shown in the use of core sentences that have subject, verb and object, butBSL allows for variable word order and does not use auxiliary verbs for negativeand interrogative sentences. These differences could lead a child who uses BSLto plan a piece of writing to produce texts that seem disconnected to a readerunfamiliar with BSL: e.g. ‘boy play where’, a literal translation from BSL intoEnglish, seems disconnected to a reader unfamiliar with BSL. In order to reachthe aim of improving the written communication of profoundly deaf childreneducated primarily in BSL so that they can more effectively live and work

within the hearing world, we need good descriptions of the levels of writingthey attain during their primary school education. In this paper, we refer todeaf children educated primarily in BSL simply as ‘child BSL users’ and thoseeducated orally as ‘oral deaf children’.

There are significant differences between BSL and English, which must beconsidered when primary school child BSL users are taught written English.Some of these are illustrated here to help make the point that planning a pieceof English writing using BSL as the inner language may make the deaf child’stask rather difficult. The examples were chosen not to develop a theory of

written language acquisition but to identify some of the issues that arise whenthe writing of deaf children is analysed. Many papers have analysed the positiveand negative transfers that can take place between signed languages and learn-ing written English (e.g. Mayer and Wells, 1996; Mason, 1997; Mayer andWells, 1997; Wilbur, 2000; Johnston, 2002), to a large extent inspired by thetheory of linguistic interdependence (Cummins, 1991); others (e.g. Singletonet al., 2004) have discussed this issue in the context of hearing bilingual learn-ers exposed to two different oral languages or exposed to a signed and an orallanguage, as in the case of hearing people born to deaf parents (Fabretti et al.,

1998). In view of the practical aim of this paper, these issues are not discussedhere.

An important difference between BSL and English, which arguably plays arole in making English literacy acquisition difficult for child BSL users, is thelack of one-to-one correspondence between signs and written words. BSL hascharacteristics that are especially suited for deaf people’s information process-ing skills (Lane, 1984; Brennan, 1993; Sutton-Spence and Woll, 1999). Forexample, BSL is a multi-channel visual language, drawing on deaf BSL users’superior ability to process simultaneous visual information (Emmorey et al.,

1993; Todman and Seedhouse, 1994; Zarfaty et al., 2004). For this reason, thereis not always a one-to-one correspondence between a word and a sign: for

l ‘ til ’ i i b t E li h th d t i



Writing profiles 5

trying to discover word order written in a story book. The ability to look atsentences in books and to try to match spoken and written words is a pre-reading skill used by hearing pre-schoolers when pretending to read (Ferreiro

and Teberosky, 1983), but this is difficult for those child BSL users who do nothave good English language skills.A second difference between BSL and English that operates at the word

level is that BSL does not contain many articles, function words (e.g. ‘to’, ‘at’),and it does not use the verb ‘to be’. Therefore these words may be omitted inchild BSL user’s written English.

Beyond these differences at the word level, there is also a difference in howmorphemes and grammar are used. BSL does not use bound morphemes (e.g.‘ed’ to mark the past tense or ‘s’ to mark plurality); these are marked in BSL

by individual signs (e.g. a sign for ‘yesterday’ indicates the past tense; pluralityis denoted by quantifiers or repetition of the sign). Such morphological differ-ences, as argued by Mayer and Wells (1996), could have an impact on deafchildren’s written production. Research with orally educated students (Tae-schner et al., 1988; Fabretti et al., 1998; McAffee et al., 1990; Tur-Kaspa andDromi, 2001) shows that omission of morphemes is common in their writtentexts but there is little information on the writing of deaf students whoseprimary language is a signed language.

The task faced by child BSL users when they are introduced to written

English is quite different from that faced by hearing and oral deaf children.Deaf child BSL users may start learning literacy with a better knowledge ofspelling than the latter children, because of their exposure to fingerspelling.Signed and written letters are different but their correspondences can be usedby deaf children in the identification of written words (Hirsh-Pasek, 1986,1987). But spelling is only the skill involved in putting particular words onpaper; it is recognised by most researchers that writing goes well beyond spell-ing, to include semantic, syntactic and pragmatic considerations (see Kress,1982; Moores, 1987; Halliday, 1989; Marschark, 1993; Mayer, 1999). Deaf

child BSL users start learning literacy with an inner speech that does not maponto written English. The development of their writing skills is still notdescribed, in spite of the large number of theoretical papers written about thepossible consequences of the use of a signed language to plan writing in deafchildren’s literacy learning. Our aim is to start to address this gap in the litera-ture, which we believe has serious consequences for the planning of deaf chil-dren’s literacy instruction.

The assessment of writing in English primary schools

The assessment of primary school children’s progress in literacy in England istl i d t di t id li d b th Q lifi ti



Burman et al.6

according to the criteria presented in Table 1. When hearing pupils are aboutseven years of age, they are expected to reach Level 2 and when they are about11 years of age they are expected to reach Level 4.

These writing levels have been used to assess deaf children who had acochlear implant before their fifth birthday and seemed to provide a basis fordescribing their literacy progress (Watson, 2002) but we suggest that they are

Table 1: Writing assessment criteria proposed by the Qualifications and Curriculum

Authority (1999) and summary of results for 2004.

Attainment target: Writing Level 1

Pupils’ writing communicates meaning through simple words and phrases. In their reading or

their writing, pupils begin to show awareness of how full stops are used. Letters are usually

clearly shaped and correctly orientated.

Level 2

Pupils’ writing communicates meaning in both narrative and non-narrative forms, using

appropriate and interesting vocabulary, and showing some awareness of the reader. Ideas are

developed in a sequence of sentences, sometimes demarcated by capital letters and full stops.

Simple, monosyllabic words are usually spelt correctly, and where there are inaccuracies the

alternative is phonetically plausible. In handwriting, letters are accurately formed and consist-ent in size.

Level 3

Pupils’ writing is often organised, imaginative and clear. The main features of different forms

of writing are used appropriately, beginning to be adapted to different readers. Sequences of

sentences extend ideas logically and words are chosen for variety and interest. The basic

grammatical structure of sentences is usually correct. Spelling is usually accurate, including

that of common, polysyllabic words. Punctuation to mark sentences — full stops, capital

letters and question marks — is used accurately. Handwriting is joined and legible.

Level 4

Pupils’ writing in a range of forms is lively and thoughtful. Ideas are often sustained anddeveloped in interesting ways and organised appropriately for the purpose of the reader.

Vocabulary choices are often adventurous and words are used for effect. Pupils are beginning

to use grammatically complex sentences, extending meaning. Spelling, including that of

polysyllabic words that conform to regular patterns, is generally accurate. Full stops, capital

letters and question marks are used correctly, and pupils are beginning to use punctuation

within the sentence. Handwriting style is fluent, joined and legible.

Summary of results for 2004

Pupils at the end of Key Stage 1 (7 years) are expected to attain Level 2. Percentages attain-

ing Level 2 or above: all pupils: 81; boys: 76; girls: 87.

Pupils at the end of Key Stage 2 (11 years) are expected to attain Level 4. Percentages attain-ing Level 4 or above: all pupils: 63; boys: 56; girls: 71.



Writing profiles 7

inadequate for most child BSL users in primary school for two reasons: they donot take into account the positive transfer and interference that might existbetween BSL and written English, and they start at a level well in advance of

the primary school child BSL users’ writing. Most pupils in the populationconcerned here would not meet the criteria for Level 1 and would be assessedas ‘W’ for many years during their learning process. This would render theassessment useless for monitoring and planning purposes and could also resultin the implicit adoption of the ‘medical deficit model’, by placing emphasis onwhat the deaf children fail to accomplish rather than by focusing on how theirwriting develops (see Rodda and Eleweke, 2000, for a discussion).

Supplementary levels have been created for use with children who haveserious language or intellectual deficits, referred to as ‘P Levels’ (see http://www.

qca.org.uk/printable.html?url=/8798_7668.html&title=English: Writing;accessed 22 August 2006), but these are well below the abilities shown by childBSL users, who have language, communication and intellectual abilities wellabove those for whom these criteria have been developed. An appropriate setof criteria is urgently needed.

METHOD

Participants

Participants were 18 boys and 11 girls, congenitally deaf, BSL users, attendingYears 5 and 6, sampled from three total communication schools for the deaf inthe London area. Their mean age was 10 years 1 month (SD = 8.01 months).This age range was selected to provide a greater variation of writing skills thanwould be observed with younger children.

All participants had a profound hearing loss (between 100–130 dB in thebetter ear), except for one girl who was severely deaf (90 dB loss in the betterear); two boys had cochlear implants and were attending special schools for

the deaf because they had not made progress in oral English. Five children wereborn to deaf parents and learned BSL as their first language. Of those born tohearing parents, seven children had at least one parent/carer able to commu-nicate in sign. The parents of the remaining 14 participants used oral commu-nication; eight used English and six had other first languages. Because of thisvariety of linguistic backgrounds, BSL was the only language common to allthe children in their classrooms and was the predominant language ofinstruction.

Design

Th t d i d t i f h Fi tl iti l bt i d



Burman et al.8

BSL: telling a story from a picture sequence is often used in the teaching ofBSL and forms part of the assessment of proficiency in BSL by CACDP(Council for the Advancement of Communication with Deaf People).

This method provides a standardised stimulus from which the children canstart their composition. Before the children start to write, the teacher leads abrief discussion of the scenes, in order to familiarise the pupils with the situa-tion. An alternative method would be to use free composition. We consideredthe advantages of free composition but decided to discard this approach forour purposes, because of the possible difficulty in understanding the meaningof the children’s writing. When the written production is not entirely con-nected text and there are spelling mistakes, the meaning of the text might beunclear and this makes it difficult for an assessor to evaluate the child’s writing.

Fabretti et al. (1998) demonstrated the difficulty of such evaluations evenwhen participants are adults with a high mastery of the written language. Athird alternative approach would be to elicit writing from a signed story (seeSwanwick, 2002). This task might be akin to translation, which is arguablydifferent from a bilingual child’s ability to perform in either language. Fabrettiet al. (1998) observed that writing a letter, the content of which was pre-established (declining an invitation), elicited significantly fewer non-standardgrammatical and morphological forms than writing a story previously told insign.

Our second step was to obtain independent ratings of the writing samplesby teachers of the deaf and assess the inter-judge reliability of their ratings.The teachers were simply asked to classify the samples into five levels of skill.Previous research indicated that, when the concepts to be used are fuzzy, oneshould start with less precise ratings, up to five or seven categories, and thenuse the categories in order to identify the criteria for inclusion in the differentlevels of performance (Nunnally, 1978).

The third step was to examine the concurrent validity of the teachers’assessment. The concurrent validity was examined in two ways. Firstly, written

productions were obtained from the same children at the start and at the endof the school year. Because our aim was to develop an assessment that can helpmeasure children’s progress, it was necessary that we should start from ratingsthat can do so. Secondly, we gave the children a reading comprehension task(Burman, 2004) and analysed the correlation between the writing levels andreading comprehension. Reading comprehension and writing ability are knownto be correlated (Parodi, in press, reports a commonality of 51.8% betweenfactors affecting comprehension and production from the cognitive/textualperspective; see also Shanahan, 1984, and Shanahan and Lomax, 1986); thus,

if a significant correlation is observed between the two assessments, there willbe some evidence for its validity.

Th f th d fi l t i t d f l i th hild ’ d ti



Writing profiles 9

Procedure

Writing samples were elicited by presenting the children with a four picturesequence (see Figure 1) in poster size and in colour at the front of the class and

asking them to write a story. Each child had a copy of the pictures on theworkbook where their story was to be written.

The researcher (the first author, who is fluent in BSL) showed the childrenthe pictures and invited them to comment on what was happening in the pic-tures. They were told they could assign names to the people and that they couldrequest the spelling of words that they wanted to write but did not know howto spell. The words they wrote from a finger-spelling or a card model wereunderlined by the researcher to show that they had received spelling help. Ifa card model was used, it was placed at a right-angle to the normal orientation

of writing, so that the child still had the task of recognising which way up toplace the card prior to copying. The children were allowed 25 minutes to writetheir story.

Creating the writing levels

Six experienced teachers of the deaf individually and independently classifiedthe children’s anonymous productions. Two productions were obtained from



Burman et al.10

the same children, one at the start and the other at the end of the school year,but the teachers were blind to testing occasion. Five levels, from least to mostproficient writing samples, were used: E represented the weakest and A the

strongest knowledge of written English.

RESULTS

The results are presented in three sections: the first describes the reliability ofthe teachers’ ratings, the second the evidence for concurrent validity of theirratings and the third presents the results of the qualitative analysis of thewriting levels.

Reliability

The inter-judge reliability of the assessments was analysed by computing theSpearman inter-correlations between the teachers’ classifications. The correla-tions for the first occasion are presented in Table 2.

The correlations were all above 0.8 and significant at the 0.01 level. Forthe second occasion, all correlations were also above 0.8 and significant at the0.01 level. Thus the teachers were able to make reliable judgements, and theirclassification could be used to produce a qualitative analysis of the different

levels of writing.For the purpose of further analyses, discrepancies were resolved by averagingacross the classifications (using numbers, 1 to 5).

Validity of the teachers’ ratings

In order to obtain an indication of the validity of the teachers’ ratings, twoanalyses were carried out. Firstly, the classifications of the children’s writing atthe start and end of the year were compared. An assessment designed for moni-

toring children’s progress is only valid if it is able to measure progress over the

Table 2: Inter-correlations between the ratings of the different teachers (N = 29).

Teacher 1 Teacher 2 Teacher 3 Teacher 4 Teacher 5

Teacher 1 —

Teacher 2 0.90** —

Teacher 3 0.89** 0.87** —

Teacher 4 0.96** 0.90** 0.90** —Teacher 5 0.92** 0.85** 0.88** 0.94** —

Teacher 6 0.96** 0.87** 0.90** 0.96** 0.93**



Writing profiles 11

course of one school year. Even if some children do not progress, the measureshould detect average progress. A t-test for correlated samples was carried out,using values from 1 to 5 to represent the levels, with 5 representing Level A.

The mean score attained by the students at the start of the school year was2.72 (SD = 1.39) and at the end of the year was 3.48 (SD = 1.33). The differ-ence between the two testing occasions was significant (t = 4.48; df = 28; p < 0.001), demonstrating that the teachers’ ratings did detect progress in chil-dren’s writing ability, even though this progress would not be detected by thelevels used in the National Curriculum levels. Thus we felt confident in theuse of these ratings as the starting point for creating descriptions of writinglevels.

The Spearman correlation between the reading comprehension and the

writing levels, both administered at the beginning of the year, was 0.71, whichis significant at the 0.01 level. This provides some indication of the externalvalidity of the teachers’ ratings.

The writing levels

The previous analyses gave us confidence in the use of the teachers’ ratings asthe starting point for the qualitative analysis of the writing samples. In orderto illustrate the standard of writing in each level, every child’s writing for

Picture 1, first assessment, is presented (Figures 2 through 6).Even a superficial reading shows that most of these productions can only beinterpreted by attempting to rephrase the text in standard form. This method,used by Fabretti et al. (1998), allowed them to arrive at a quantitative analysisof adults’ writing, which identified the number of omissions, non-standardforms (e.g. use of wrong tenses or agreement between noun, adjective andarticle) and unnecessary insertions (e.g. use of an article before a verb). Thisstrategy could not be used with the writing samples in our study for two reasons.First, there were productions whose meaning we could not identify. Second,

there were also many productions the meaning of which could be interpretedbut there would be many alternative ways of rephrasing the texts; identifyingdifferent standard forms results in quantifying the non-standard forms differ-ently. Thus we decided to analyse the samples qualitatively and provide adescription of the common features to create a profile of each level. When weprovide interpretations of the children’s writing, these are used in order to seektheir meaning, and not for quantification. Our interpretations are presented insquare brackets; the reader can then assess whether alternative interpretationswould better fit the context.

Levels were conceived in a way that progress attained in the lower levelsshould also be manifested in higher levels. For example, the criterion ‘uses

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Burman et al.12

l l



Writing profiles 13

Level E represents the weakest productions in this study (n = 7). Thesesamples show that the children were able to form letters correctly. Under-lined words denote that a spelling was asked for in BSL. Most of the children

were able to write the correct letters when provided with the finger-spellingfor the words. However, not all children in Level E were able to do this: ‘dayclothes dag’ was copied from written flash-cards. Children who request aspelling for a sign understand that letters can be used to represent signs andoffer a means of communication, which is not the case for all children (seethe P levels referred to earlier on). It is not clear whether they realise thatletters represent the sounds in English or whether they think in terms ofdirect connections between BSL signs and written words. However, the wordsequences observed in this level of writing reflect neither BSL nor English

syntax.The writing profile for Level E was created by summarising the features ofthe samples that had been classified in this level. At Level E the writing sampledemonstrates ability to:

• write correctly oriented letters;• use spaces to create letter sequences that resemble words but are not always

identifiable words even in context (e.g. ‘wihus’; ‘Ba’);• memorise some finger-spelling configurations and their corresponding

written letter;• produce letter sequences for isolated words, which may or may not be rel-evant to the situation (e.g. ‘door dag or’ written under the picture of thecar travelling to the coast);

• occasionally, but not systematically, place a definite or indefinite articlebefore a remembered spelling, which may be correct or incorrect, and mayor may not be a noun (e.g. ‘A play barch to two boy play’ [interpreted as‘two boys play on the beach’], ‘a the simning’ [interpreted as ‘the boy andgirl go swimming’]).

Level D writing (n = 7) shows that the children were able to write somewords without help and to choose appropriate words to write under the picturesbut some obscure spellings are also observed. Their writing includes Englishwords not used in BSL, such as ‘to’ and ‘the’. Word sequences were not well-formed sentences but it is possible to identify some noun phrases and subject-verb word order. This indicates the emergence of English syntax. The inclusionof memorised words, for example, ‘bags’, ‘father’, ‘holiday’ and ‘summer’ sug-gests that the children understand that writing is a form of communication and

that the writing and the picture go together to create a meaningful story.Occasional errors when the children wrote words that were finger-spelled wereb d



Burman et al.14

Figure 3: Level D Writing Samples.



Writing profiles 15

• write some sequences showing BSL word order with emerging Englishsyntax marked by the presence of grammatical morphemes (e.g. ‘father bagput to the car’ shows non-standard English word order, with the object

before the verb, but also a preposition and an article);• form noun phrases and use subject-verb word order;• use pronouns (mostly I), conjunctions and some function words;• include some appropriate, although not systematic, punctuation;• begin to name people in order to create a story character.

Level C productions (n = 6) mainly demonstrate BSL syntax but also showemerging English grammar in the use of phrases — for example, ‘we went to’,‘One day’, ‘The lady made’ and ‘in the bag’. The words ‘went’ and ‘to’ show a

grasp of English past tense and use of a preposition, neither of which is usedin BSL. All the samples include verbs and show subject-verb word order. Thislevel of writing can be interpreted as a text by a reader even if more than oneinterpretation is possible and there any many non-standard forms.

In short, writing samples in Level C demonstrate ability to:

• use a higher proportion of words relevant to the story than of unidentifiablespellings or irrelevant words;

• place words in a coherent order with greater awareness of English syntax

(e.g. ‘Sard [character’s name] want look to the biggest fish’);• include verbs in most sentences and use subject-verb word order;• start to organise sequences in a developing story;• use some English idiomatic expressions (e.g. ‘tidy up’, ‘far away’) and

expressions typical of stories (e.g. ‘One day’);• correctly use optional elements in English syntax, for example, by placing

an adjective before a noun.

Level B productions (n = 5) essentially show the use of English words for

BSL signs but also indicate awareness of English syntax, through the use ofprepositions and pronouns, and a growing awareness of story development, bygiving names to and describing characters. Writing samples at this level differfrom those classified in Level C mostly by the use of a concatenation of sen-tences which begin to form a text.

Writing samples classified as Level B demonstrate the ability to:

• produce a text where the vast majority of words are relevant to the story;even if the spellings are not accurate, the words are recognisable in context

(e.g. ‘gril’ for ‘girl’; ‘very tried’ for ‘very tired’; ‘hoilday’ for ‘holiday’; ‘clot’for ‘clothes’; and ‘divir’ for ‘drive’);

• t ib BSL i t E li h d ( ‘i ill t d h ild ith



Burman et al.16

Figure 4: Level C Writing Samples.



Writing profiles 17

Figure 5: Level B Writing Samples.



Burman et al.18

• include English words not used in BSL more systematically, not onlyoccasionally;

• include English syntax through use of noun phrases and subject-verb-

object sequences;• develop a story and create a character (e.g. ‘Put bag in a car Daddy wasslepp in car was fast. Arrive in Spian that very hot in costa brava’ [notethat the child names the beach as Costa Brava in order to develop thestory]).

Level A productions (n = 4) show more systematic use of the indefinite anddefinite articles, prepositions, conjunctions, inflections and the inclusion of theverb ‘to be’. The first instances of subordinate clauses were observed in the

texts, with ‘because’ as the conjunction.Writing samples in Level A demonstrate the ability to:

• use pronouns other than ‘I’ and English grammar (pronouns followed byverbs, even if agreement is not correct: e.g. ‘he put’, ‘We goes’);

• include sufficient English syntax to produce fully standard sentences (e.g.‘The boy was called Sam’), though non-standard forms may appear also;

• expand on the description of scenes (e.g. ‘Mummy and two children havea foods for family, when family feel very hunry in the car, then family have

a foods’);• use of subordinate clauses;• use a higher proportion of accurate than wrong spellings and almost exclu-

sively identifiable words even if some spellings are not accurate nor mor-phologically appropriate (e.g. ‘The Sam goes downsalts [downstairs] andput the Bag in the car Dada say “hey we Ready for Lunch now” ’.).

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION

Our aim was to develop a measure of child BSL users’ progress in writingEnglish, which could then be used to assess the children’s progress and helpdefine teaching aims for them. Our approach was to start with samples ofwritten productions, elicited by a set of pictures and a discussion of what theyshowed, but without a specific story which the children were expected to write.The children were free to produce the content of the text themselves.

As hypothesised in the design section, where we presented the rationale forour choice of method, it proved useful to have a constrained production: onmany occasions, it was easier to interpret non-standard spellings and grammati-

cal constructions because the context for the writing was known. This alsoallowed us to realise that some of the children, particularly those whose produc-ti l ifi d i L l E d D i l d d i th i iti lli hi h



Writing profiles 19



Burman et al.20

Writing samples of these two most rudimentary levels suggest that childBSL users face difficulties not encountered by children who already speakEnglish: they have to learn that the language they are learning to write does

not represent their language of instruction in school.Samples classified in the two lowest levels show little evidence of use ofEnglish syntax. It is only from Level C onwards that the written sentences showa consistent use of noun phrases and subject-verb constructions, thus goingbeyond the use of unconnected words. The use of words that appear in Englishbut not in BSL — such as articles, prepositions and the verb ‘to be’ is rare inthe writing samples classified below Level C.

Consistent use of noun phrases and verbs, which can help identify units inwriting, is only present in writing samples classified in Levels B and A. Evi-

dence of connections between clauses is only present in writing samples clas-sified as Level A. However, the still only emergent use of English syntaxprevents these samples from meeting the criteria specified for Level 1 in the

National Curriculum, which requires children to be able to communicate usingsimple words and sentences.

We suggest that the use of these profiles in the assessment and design ofspecific instruction for deaf child BSL users can make a contribution to theirteaching and learning. Webster (2000) recognised the importance of literacyfor deaf individuals to function in a hearing society and expressed dismay at

the difficulty of locating effective routes for raising literacy achievements forthe deaf; he argued that the ‘spectacular lack of success by most deaf children’(p. 131) in literacy should bring about more research to determine the effec-tiveness of different instructional methods. We suggest that, without properassessment tools, it is difficult to carry out meaningful research.

Mayer (1999) also addressed the low literacy levels of deaf individuals andpointed out that their reading attainment is often at higher levels than theirwriting, because in reading they can use compensatory strategies whereas theseare of much less consequence for writing. She further suggests that descriptions

that focus only on what might be seen as the deficiencies of the texts producedby deaf students are less helpful than those that can shed some light on theprocess of writing acquisition and composition. We believe that the descrip-tions offered in this paper are a first step towards understanding these processesin child BSL users.

However, we are very aware of the limitations of this initial work and theneed for further research. First, our samples were small and restricted to primaryschool age; it cannot be expected that they will represent all the variationsthat can be observed before children reach Level 1 in the National Curriculum.

It is important to obtain larger samples of writing and analyse how well theselevels describe child BSL users’ performance. Second, we recognise that a

bt i d d ti t i t i il f f



Writing profiles 21

piece were to be obtained by increasing the amount of support that the childrenreceive, their difficulties could be easily underestimated. Finally, it is also neces-sary to evaluate through future research whether teachers can reliably use the

criteria provided by our writing profiles to assess their pupils’ progress anddesign further instruction for them: this is, in the end, the proof of the pudding— the translation of assessment into practice that supports children’s furtherlearning.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank the staff and pupils of Heathlands School for Deaf Children,St Albans, and Grove House and Blanche Nevile Schools for the Deaf for

participating in this study. Without their generous collaboration, this workwould not have been possible.

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