Deafness and Reading for Meaning - 'DReaM'

The Deafness and Reading for Meaning (DReaM) project team are launching a new research project to involve schools and services as partners in a new collaborative project which further develops the 2011/12 DReaM research (Swanwick, Clarke & Kitchen, 2012).

The DReaM work so far illustrates that practitioners and parents are already addressing many of the issues associated with deaf children’s poor comprehension skills with a good understanding of the complexities and realities of the research context. However, there is a continued need for the development of evidenced-based intervention programmes that address the full range of comprehension skills and processes.

This project is piloting a methodology for working in partnership with practitioners to develop a provision map and action plan for developing deaf children’s reading comprehension. It is a small scale pilot study which will involve one school for the deaf and one inclusive service. Each setting will be fully funded to second one practitioner-researcher (PR) to work with the University team between January and April 2013. 

The PR will work with the University team to create a provision map and action plan for training and development for their setting based on a framework for reading comprehension. This will involve consultation with staff members in their schools and finding out about existing interventions and teaching approaches.
The whole school /service will be invited to be involved in a consultation meeting in Autumn 2012 and will be offered a bespoke training session in Spring 2013. Each setting will also be funded to be involved in national collaborative dissemination activities.

The main outcome of the project will be the development of a bespoke framework for development of reading comprehension for each setting. This will be produced as set of principles in a written document.

This research is being supported by The School of Education, University of Leeds and has been granted ethical approval from the Faculty Ethics committee.  If you are interested in finding out more about this project please do contact us so that we can discuss this further.