1 Early Literacy of Kindergartners With Hearing Impairment The Role of Mother-Child Collaborative Writing Dorit Aram Tova Most Adi Ben Simon Tel Aviv University The study assessed the value of maternal writing mediation in predicting children’s early literacy. Thirty kindergartners with hearing impairment (HI) and their mothers participated. Mothers were videotaped at home while helping their children write words, and the children’s early literacy was assessed in the kindergarten. Maternal writing mediation was analyzed in terms of its cognitive and emo- tional aspects. Results show that beyond the child’s age and his or her degree of hearing loss, the cognitive aspects of maternal writ- ing mediation predicted word writing (11%), word recognition (34%), and letter knowledge (35%). Beyond the background measures, the emotional aspects of the mediation predicted word recognition (12%), letter knowledge (14%), and general knowledge (9%). Discussion focuses on writing interactions as a context of early literacy development among kindergartners with HI. Keywords: joint writing; kindergartners; deaf/hearing impaired; parent-child interaction; early literacy; phonology T he study examined the context of early literacy development among kindergartners with hearing impairment (HI), focusing on the role of mother-child collaborative writing. Success in acquiring literacy skills offers one of the central keys to scholastic achievement. Yet for many children with HI, reading and writing pose great difficulty (e.g., Howell & Luckner, 2003; Musselman, 2000), and progress in the literacy domain is extremely slow (Harris & Beech, 1998; Kyle & Harris, 2005; Marschark & Harris, 1996). Studies of reading acquisition in children with HI have reported that their language skills, phonological awareness, and language comprehension in kindergarten predicted reading progress in first grade (Colin, Magnan, Ecalle, & Leybaert, 2004; Harris & Beech, 1998). The evidence regarding continuity in literacy achievements invites research to tease apart possible sources of these differences in early literacy among young children with HI. Reading tasks require the same acquisition of skills whether a child is hearing or deaf (Luetke-Stahlman & Nielsen, 2003). Research on hearing children that has examined the issue of continuity in the transition from kindergarten to school has emphasized the role of alpha- betic skills and phonological awareness in kindergarten as chief predictors of decoding accuracy, reading flu- ency, and reading comprehension at the beginning of school (e.g., Badian, 2001; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Shanahan, 2001; Stern & Goswami, 2000). Compared with the wide volume of studies on hearing children’s early literacy development, only a few investigators have described the development of early lit- eracy in young children with HI (Williams, 2004). Nevertheless, some data have indicated that beyond the language delay, which is a hallmark of hearing loss (Musselman, 2000), kindergartners with HI lag behind in alphabetic skills, such as letter naming, word identifica- tion, and word writing (e.g., Mayer, 2007; Most, Aram, & Andorn, 2006), as well as in phonological awareness (e.g., Allman, 2002, Colin et al., 2004) relative to their hearing peers. Williams (2004) reviewed the literature on early liter- acy in children with HI and concluded that their literacy development comprises a naturally emerging process that can parallel that of hearing children, given support- ive literacy environments. However, researchers have asserted that children with HI experience less exposure than hearing children to such adult-child literacy-related interactions prior to entering school (Luetke-Stahlman, 1999; Marschark, 1993; Williams, 1994). Observations in homes of young hearing children revealed that children are engaged in writing interactions with their parents. They pretend to write in their parents’ Topics in Early Childhood Special Education Volume XX Number X Month XXXX xx-xx © 2008 Hammill Institute on Disabilities 10.1177/0271121408314627 http://tecse.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com