Video/caption technology and foreign sign language can be successful ingredients for developing literacy skills in a foreign language. Using this technology, we - the authors - produced a unique Spanish reading program for American deaf students. In this paper, we describe the reading program, explain the theoretical rationale behind this combined approach, and discuss the results of the experimental assessment procedure. The project consists of Spanish readings that go along with Spanish-captioned narratives in Costa Rican Sign Language (LESCO). The assessment shows that the students learned to associate specific LESCO signs with specific words in Spanish, thus improving vocabulary retention. Additionally, the LESCO stories created a scaffold for the students to approach the written texts simultaneously in a top-down and bottom-up fashion. This helped their global comprehension and improved their motivation towards the reading task.