Kimberly A. Wolbers

I am a professor of Deaf Education at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. My research focuses on the design and implementation of writing and language instruction for deaf and hard of hearing children and adolescents. I conceptualized an approach called Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI), which aims to be responsive to the varied language needs of deaf learners. SIWI draws upon evidence-based approaches to teaching writing such as strategy instruction in writing and collaborative, interactive writing. SIWI also contains language-specific elements that provide teachers with direction on how to, for example, navigate between ASL and English when teaching developing bilinguals, or facilitate greater expressive language clarity and complexity among children with language delays. There is growing evidence to suggest SIWI has a positive impact on students’ expressive language, word identification, motivation, and writing outcomes at the word-, sentence-, and discourse-levels.
Learn more about SIWI and access recent research at siwi.utk.edu