Deaf Students' Reading and Writing in College: Fluency, Coherence, and Comprehension

Research in discourse reveals numerous cognitive connections between reading and writing. Rather than one being the inverse of the other, there are parallels and interactions between them. To understand the variables and possible connections in the reading and writing of adult deaf students, we manipulated writing conditions and reading texts. First, to test the hypothesis that a fluent writing process leads to richer content and a higher degree of coherence in a written summary, we interrupted the writing process with verbal and nonverbal intervening tasks. The negligible effect of the interference indicated that the stimuli texts were not equivalent in terms of coherence and revealed a relationship between coherence of the stimuli texts, amount of content recalled, and coherence of the written summaries. To test for a possible effect of coherence on reading comprehension, we manipulated the coherence of the texts. We found that students understood the more coherent versions of the passages better than the less coherent versions and were able to accurately distinguish between them. However, they were not able to judge comprehensibility. Implications for further research and classroom application are discussed.