Bedrock -More Information

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Foundational English Literacy for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students
by Kristin A. Di Perri, Ed.D.

The Bedrock Literacy Curriculum is designed specifically for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) students. Rather than a traditional step-by-step curriculum, Bedrock is a framework that helps teachers build literacy skills in meaningful, visually based ways—closing gaps and promoting lasting understanding.

Bedrock provides a developmental roadmap (not a grade-level program) for teaching how to read, how to write, and how to build an essential beginning vocabulary, while introducing the foundations of grammar. Its activities engage students’ meta-cognitive and meta-linguistic skills, guiding them to become independent thinkers and meaning-makers—the hallmark of true literacy.

Every element of Bedrock is designed to make sense to DHH learners who have had limited access to English, offering the visual and conceptual “building blocks” all literate individuals need for lifelong language and literacy growth.

Teachers of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) students are asked to meet a wide range of needs. For students who have access to spoken English, traditional literacy instruction may be effective. But what happens when a student is an ASL user? Or when a child has grown up with limited access to any language at all? What if the student cannot rely on English phonology to learn to read and write?

Too often, teachers are told to “adapt” or “tweak” mainstream curricula designed for hearing children—as if early language exposure from birth to age five were optional. In reality, hearing children entering kindergarten already possess a vast foundation of spoken language knowledge that they simply learn to map onto print. DHH students without that linguistic foundation face a fundamentally different task.

When teachers are left to adapt phonics-based programs, the result is predictable: underdeveloped literacy skills, teacher frustration, and students who remain dependent on others to write or spell for them.

Common questions arise:

• How can students learn to read if they can’t sound out words?
   
• Will signing or copying signs be enough?
   
• How can they write independently if they rely on me to spell every word?
   
• How can they remember vocabulary or spelling patterns without sound?
   

Bedrock was created to answer these questions.

Many DHH students need a fundamentally different entry point into literacy—one that begins with concepts, builds through visual and language-neutral activities, and then connects to ASL and English. Bedrock provides that structure. Its activities capitalize on the visual strengths of DHH learners while explicitly teaching how English “works.”

By focusing on conceptual understanding and cognitive accessibility rather than sound-based decoding, Bedrock offers a path toward genuine literacy for all students—regardless of language modality.

The Bedrock Literacy Curriculum is designed for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) students—whether they use ASL, Spoken English, Signed English, Total Communication, or Cued Speech—who have had limited or incomplete access to English.

While it can be introduced as early as Kindergarten, Bedrock is not a grade-level program. It follows a developmental sequence, making it appropriate for any student—of any age—who has not yet built a solid foundation in reading, writing, vocabulary, and basic grammar.

Although originally written for younger learners, the instructional principles of Bedrock—conceptual learning, visual mapping, and explicit structure—make it highly effective for students of any age who have missed foundational skill building. Whether a student is just starting school or is in middle or high school, these same principles help rebuild the base that supports literacy growth. Bedrock’s developmental design ensures that instruction begins where understanding begins—empowering all learners to make genuine progress in reading and writing.

The same principles also apply to newly arrived DHH students from other countries who may have had little or no access to language or formal education. Because Bedrock builds knowledge from the ground up, teachers can use the unit objectives to identify each student’s current level and guide them toward true literacy development.