Driven by my professional experience teaching English language and literature while supporting students in developing strong literacy skills, including children with learning disabilities, together with my personal experience as a parent of a post lingually deaf daughter, I am passionate about addressing the ‘literacy gap’ for deaf and hard of hearing students. 

While modern deaf and hard of hearing education often relies on fingerspelling phonics, there remains a critical need to identify tools that provide better access to the phonological foundations of English.

Cued speech is used to support speech perception as it identifies both individual sounds as well as running speech, enabling deaf and hard of hearing students to see language as not merely a collection of single phonemes but rather a complex body of sounds orchestrated to achieve meaning.

A translanguaging approach ensures that both visual (Auslan) and auditory languages (English) are used as scaffolds to greater proficiency, independence of expression and metacognitive development.

Multisensory and visual resources are used to support the acquisition of English.