Language and Literacy Acquisition in Hearing Impaired Children

Paper Summary:

Many factors determine how a hearing-impaired child will acquire language skills, including the severity of the hearing disability, the age of onset, whether the child has hearing or deaf parents, the technology to which the child has access, and the home and school environments, among others. This paper explores various methods of teaching deaf students, including manual languages such as ASL and codes such as SEE 1, the oral approach, speech reading, and total communication. Each can be effective alone or in combination. In addition, there are various ways schools and parents can facilitate the language and reading abilities of hearing-impaired students.

From the Paper:

"The bilingual-bicultural school of thought holds that deaf children need to be bilingual (in both manual and oral communication) in order to thrive. Bilingual-bicultural education programs emphasize early language acquisition and the special social needs of deaf children (Andrews et al., 1997). This philosophy advocates for the use of ASL as the first language of the deaf child, and maintains that such children are visual learners and should not be mainstreamed, but should be in environments that provide full communicative access to the curriculum. Adherents to this school of thought also believe that one should not speak English while signing ASL (Baker & Baker, 1997)."

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