Jennifer S Beal

• Doctor of Education
• Professor at Valdosta State University

This article presents receptive and expressive American Sign Language skills of 85 students, 6 through 22 years of age at a residential school for the deaf using the American Sign Language Receptive Skills Test and the Ozcaliskan Motion Stimuli. Results are presented by ages and indicate that students’ receptive skills increased with age and were s...

The authors evaluated the research base relative to technology use with deaf and hard of hearing students, examining 29 peer-reviewed studies published January 2000-August 2013 that used technology-based intervention (multimedia instructional applications/software) and investigating its effects on academic variables (academic skills used in instruc...

The Authors examined classifier production during narrative retells by 10 deaf and hard of hearing students in grades 2-4 at a day school for the deaf following a 6-week intervention of repeated viewings of stories in American Sign Language (ASL) paired with scripted teacher mediation. Classifier production, documented through a multiple-baseline-a...

Historically, researchers have identified that reading outcomes for students in upper grades who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) have typically rested around the late 3rd to early 4th grade. In recent years, wide-scale state-level testing has called into question these prognostications. The authors conducted a descriptive, multiunit, embedde...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Responsive, high-quality literacy instruction is critical for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students as they may not be in an environment that provides full access to language and/or receive insufficient instruction. This second edition of Literacy Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing updates previous findings and describes cur...

Researchers have focused on how deaf signing children acquire and use American Sign Language (ASL). One sub-skill of ASL proficiency is ASL phonology. This includes the ability to isolate and manipulate parameters within signs (i.e., handshape, location, and movement). Expressively, signed language phonological fluency tasks have investigated signe...

We investigated the receptive American Sign Language (ASL) skills of four separate groups using the 42-item ASL-Receptive Skills Test: Deaf high school-aged students who attended a residential school; deaf incoming college students who preferred signed language; deaf incoming college students who preferred spoken language; and typically hearing col...

There are over 135,000 deaf/hard of hearing students enrolled in postsecondary institutions in the U.S. However, deaf students who use sign language may not be aware of their sign language skills, resulting in accommodations that do not provide full access to postsecondary course content and reduced degree completion rates compared to their typical...

The present study used an observational learning framework to investigate changes in non-native signing deaf children's narrative renditions before (Time 1) and after (Time 2) a single viewing of a signing adult's rendition of the same story. The deaf adult model rendered the picture book Goodnight Gorilla in American Sign Language (ASL) with the p...

Few American Sign Language (ASL) assessments are readily available for educators to administer and score to document deaf students’ skill levels and direct ASL instruction. Even fewer studies include deaf students with intellectual disabilities or document deaf students’ ASL skills across time. The present study reports deaf school-aged students’ r...

Currently researchers and university professors have limited evidence related to how typically hearing adult learners acquire American Sign Language (ASL) as a second language. We investigated university interpreting and deaf education majors’ fluency using an ASL phonological sign generation task in which participants produce signs related to thre...

Two key areas of language development include semantic and phonological knowledge. Semantic knowledge relates to word and concept knowledge. Phonological knowledge relates to how language parameters combine to create meaning. We investigated signing deaf adults' and children's semantic and phonological sign generation via one-minute tasks, includin...

This article presents results of a longitudinal study of receptive American Sign Language (ASL) skills for a large portion of the student body at a residential school for the deaf across four consecutive years. Scores were analyzed by age, gender, parental hearing status, years attending the residential school, and presence of a disability (i.e., d...

We investigated twelve deaf adults' use of American Sign Language (ASL) in video-recorded narrative renditions of a wordless picture storybook. All of the adults had typically hearing parents and were divided between earlier and later ASL acquisition. Specifically, we analyzed their use of depicting verbs, constructed action, lexical signs, and com...

In deaf education , the sign language skills of teacher and interpreter candidates are infrequently assessed; when they are, formal measures are commonly used upon preparation program completion, as opposed to informal measures related to instructional tasks. Using an informal picture storybook task, the authors investigated the receptive and expre...

Using a toolkit of thirty modified and newly developed assessments administered to ninety deaf college students, seventeen authors associated with Gallaudet University’s Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) center investigated how deaf college students who learn via a visual pathway in the (near) absence of auditory knowledge performed on meas...

Current initiatives in education, such as No Child Left Behind and the National Common Core Standards movement, call for the use of evidence-based practices, or those instructional practices that are supported by documentation of their effectiveness related to student learning outcomes, including students with special needs. While hearing loss is a...

This chapter reviews research on communication and vocabulary development of deaf and hard of hearing children with hearing parents from infancy through preschool, as well as features of their language learning environment. Important aspects of early development include the acquisition of complex vocalizations or babbling, intentional communication...

The purpose of this study was to determine if the frequent use of a targeted, computer software grammar instruction program, used as an individualized classroom activity, would influence the comprehension of morphosyntax structures (determiners, tense, and complementizers) in deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) participants who use American Sign Language (A...

We examined acquisition of grapheme–phoneme correspondences by 4 deaf and hard-of-hearing preschoolers using instruction from a curriculum designed specifically for this population supplemented by Visual Phonics. Learning was documented through a multiple baseline across content design as well as descriptive analyses. Preschoolers who used sign lan...