The text acknowledges that children, who have been hearing impaired throughout their entire lives, pose a unique dilemma if reading is essentially rooted in speech. Nonetheless, many deaf children are determined to learn how to read. Whether the phonics method or the whole word method is the best process to teach a person how to read, people who are deaf have no other choice but to use the whole word method when they try to learn how to become literate. Although they lack phonological awareness, deaf readers can use orthographic representations in order to become familiar with printed text and its meaning. Several researchers have delineated levels of development that young deaf children commonly appear to endure when they learn to read. According to a recent article published in the respected journal Amercian Annals of the Deaf, "[t]he general progression of reading development for deaf children begins with the labeling of people and objects represented by pictures in books, followed by development of story lines to represent the action of the pictures by reading familiar words in context, focusing on sign print, relating sign print to written English, and reading written English independently for meaning" (Rottenberg, 2001). Clearly, the reading process for a deaf child requires certain steps and stages. It also appears that deaf children require more steps in learning how to read than a child who possesses phonoloigical awareness, as the process also involves learning sign language. By analyzing the method, deaf children must first use orthographic representations in order to familiarize themselves with some basic and random stimuli from the environment. Books with various contingent pictures are generally used to provide deaf children with exposure to certain objects. Next, various orthographic stimuli must be presented together in a certain sequential pattern, in order to suggest a picture story where each picture follows a certain chronological order.
