Difficulties in reading comprehension in deaf students

The aim of this study was to expose the difficulties in comprehension of texts of deaf students in Primary and Secondary Education. Reading comprehension (a basic competence in educational methodology) is the result of an interactive process that involves decoding, linguistic comprehension and the construction of a representation from the text. Deaf students have reading difficulties at different levels. They have some problems in basic processes: phonological awareness, lexical decoding, vocabulary access and grammatical competence. For the other hand, they have specific difficulties in reading comprehension skills, especially to make inferences (related or not to prior knowledge), to make integration of relevant information and to use effective metacognitive and self-regulation abilities. It might be beneficial to develop reading comprehension programs for deaf people that focus in specific strategies and to assess scientifically their effectiveness.