A three-week summer program for economically disadvantaged and minority children with hearing loss in DC, providing them with intensive language, speech and literacy intervention. The goal is to improve their overall receptive and expressive language skills and bridge the summer months, keeping them engaged in learning.
Children with hearing loss are at risk for delays in vocabulary due to lack of auditory access early in their development. When they are from low-income backgrounds, where there often is less access to books and print materials at home, the risk of delayed development is even greater. Summer break from school can compound these delays as progress made during the school year can diminish. In the end, these children often enter school lacking the skills necessary for success.
The primary goal of this proposed project is to employ interactive reading techniques in an intensive 3-week summer program for low-income children ages 5-8 with hearing loss, primarily those from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds, in order to improve overall receptive and expressive language skills.
In addition to providing support for academic success, this intervention approach can have far-reaching impact and be used not only with low-income students with hearing loss but with a variety of students from low-income backgrounds as well as those with language-based disorders. The outcomes from this project will provide a basis for a formalized summer intervention program for low-income children with hearing loss, designed to support vocabulary and grammatical development.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
