"The average deaf high school graduate reads at a fourth-grade level." How many times have we heard this? So many that I wonder if that statistic is out of date by now or if it still holds true?
Many parents of deaf children harbor the fear that their child will turn out to be one of those barely literate deaf individuals. And for good reason. Inability to read and write well means that a deaf person will have difficulty communicating with hearing people both on and off the job. It may also inhibit a deaf person's ability to advance on the job.
So where is the magic bullet? What way is best? Oral? Auditory-Verbal? Manual? TC? SEE? Bi-Bi? Cued Speech? No one knows and can really say, because every deaf child is an individual who responds differently to different methods. Students from mainstream environments have graduated with language skills just as poor as students from schools for the deaf. If someone were to do a totally neutral study and found that you must raise deaf children orally in order for them to be able to read and write well, I would stop using sign language with my child tomorrow.
At one time, things were so dire that Gallaudet University launched Literacy 2000, an ambitious program that funded several projects aimed at raising students' language skills.
In our area, total communication, cued speech, and oral communication options are available in the schools. However, not all parents of deaf/hoh children are as fortunate to have access to so many options for educating their children.
An About visitor wrote:
I'm writing in response to an article titled "Deaf People and English." In it the author says that there is no "magic bullet" and that it is not known which communication method will remediate the print literacy dificulties that deaf children face. The reason the author gives for this state of affairs is that "every deaf child is an individual...." and that variation the deaf population prevents the discovery of remediation.
But, consider this. In the last 30 years we have discovered how to best teach reading to hearing children (who also vary greatly). In fact, national panels on reading instriction have included students with several disabilities in their conclusions - which introduces even more variation. In other words, the fact that deaf students are individuals is not the problem.
So, what might be the problem? It seems to me that there is one huge difference that accompanies the reading success of hearing kids and the great dificulties deaf kids face, and that is the amount of research done. The national panels that have looked at reading instruction for hearing kids have reviewed (I'm not making this up) 100.000 empirical studies of reading! From this, instructional directions have been determined. We lack instructional know how in deaf education - not because of variation among deaf kids and certainly not a lack of efforts by their teachers - but because we don't have the reserch knowedge base. I hope that the more people who learn about the lack of research on this critical topic, the greater the demand for its execution will be. Think of it; 100,000 studies of hearing kids, don't you think its time for deaf kids to get a share of this bounty?
