Chinese Grammatical Development of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children in a Sign Bilingualism and Coenrollment Program.

The literacy development of d/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) children has always been a matter of grave concern among educators, and grammatical knowledge is said to constitute a major component such development. The present article reports on a study that examined the development of Chinese grammar among groups of d/Dhh and hearing children who received education through a sign bilingualism and coenrollment (SLCO) approach. Findings from administration of a prestandardized assessment tool showed that while the d/Dhh children generally lagged behind their hearing peers at all levels, the gap began to narrow from Primary 2 onward, and they caught up with their hearing peers in most except for a few grammatical constructions by Primary 4.

Literacy Learning of Deaf and Hearing Preschoolers in a Sign Bilingual, Coenrollment Setting in Hong Kong.

The study investigated the literacy-learning conditions of a group of deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) and hearing preschoolers in a mainstream kindergarten sign bilingualism and coenrollment (SLCO) program. The data came from the children's scores on tests of Chinese vocabulary and written Chinese grammar, and questionnaire responses on literacy-learning conditions at home (from parents) and in school (from teachers). The d/Dhh children's performance on the two tests, when compared with that of their hearing peers, suggested that adding sign language and Deaf teachers to the SLCO classroom did not adversely affect the d/Dhh children's literacy learning.

A research and policy agenda for the post-pandemic world.

The COVID-19 pandemic response has engaged the academic, public, private and health sectors in the real-time development of technologies and practices to enable predictive, preventive, personalised and participatory (P4) health. Myriad cases of collaborative innovation across these sectors have emerged throughout the pandemic response (despite certain observed technical, social and institutional barriers) that serve as examples to address post-pandemic health system challenges. In this paper, we propose a joint research and policy agenda to generate the knowledge and practices to identify and extend these acute gains toward chronic health system challenges in the post-pandemic era.

Oral Language Performance of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students in Mainstream Schools.

In Hong Kong, students are expected to speak fluent Cantonese, Putonghua, and English. However, the curriculum does not include Cantonese studies, as children are expected to have already acquired Cantonese by the age of school entry. This study examined the language outcomes of Cantonese-speaking deaf or hard-of-hearing children who attend primary schools within the Hong Kong educational system and considered whether the system currently meets the needs of these children.

The development of discourse referencing in Cantonese of deaf/hard-of-hearing children.

This paper investigates the development of discourse referencing in spoken Cantonese of fifteen deaf/hard-of-hearing children studying in a sign bilingual and co-enrollment education programme in a mainstream setting in Hong Kong. A comparison of their elicited narratives with those of the hearing children and adults shows that, despite a delay in acquiring the grammatical markings for (in)definiteness in Cantonese, these d/hh children show sensitivity towards the referential properties of different types of nominal expressions and their corresponding mappings with discourse functions. Specifically, they produced more bare nouns across all discourse contexts but fewer existential constructions, pronouns, demonstratives, and classifier-related constructions.