How do they teach someone who’s deaf from birth to read?

I was just thinking about it as I looked at the fire alarm strobe here in the hotel. If they were bron deaf and could never hear anything from birth how do they know what someone is signing to them and how to put the letters together to make words? How do they know, when they are first learning, what someone is signing to them?

The answer to this question has taken me 4 years of undergraduate and 1 year of master’s work to really be able to answer! Deaf children cannot depend on their hearing to learn to communicate, read, or write. HOWEVER, they CAN still do this. The short answer…use their 1st langauge (american sign langauge) to teach them English (reading and writing). This is the same idea as teaching a spanish speaking child to speak English by using Spanish.

SO! Rather than using phonics and speech to teach sounds and words, deaf and hard of hearing students rely on lipreading, body movement, and sign to learn language. (Visual methods). When you are teaching a deaf child letters, you would show him the letter and the handshape of that letter so that they can make that physical and visual association.

Much like hearing children, deaf children don’t innately know language. They must learn it over time. Hearing kids pick up spoken language because their parents use it all day every day to communicate with them. As they grow older, they simply pick up and begin to use the language as they are encouraged to do so. The same is true with deaf children. As their parents sign to them all day every day, they will begin to pick up and use the langauge in the same way.

Many teachers of deaf children also use a method called “whole to part” teaching. An example of this would be to sign a story to the class (without showing print), then take turns re-telling the story, then add the print, break down the print to encourage good grammar and structure, then put it all back together to create a whole langauge lesson.

If you want more information, please feel free to contact me!

Pillpaks: birth control cases with an alarm

Pregnancy and Birth: $10.16 Pregnancy and Birth

Birth $15.99 M-net Media:3138858

General Alarm Plaque General Alarm Plaque $10.94 General Alarm Plaque General Alarm Plaque Bernard Engraving Co. General Alarm Plaque – GENERAL ALARM PLAQUE

Comments are closed