Section 8 – How about deaf children?
The idea that understanding print is just like understanding speech has hugely exciting implications for the education of deaf children.
At the moment, we assume that deaf children – like hearing children – have to learn spoken language first, and then learn written language in relation to speech. So all the emphasis is on providing the best possible hearing aids, etc. etc.
Hearing aids were not nearly so advanced in the 1920s, which was why Dr Helen Thompson developed her revolutionary approach to teaching deaf children to understand print directly, by presenting written words in a physical context. (See Section 4, What about phonics?) The children had no difficulty learning to read in this way, and at the end of a year had achieved 5/6 of the comprehension standard of a normal hearing class. (Helen Thompson, An Experimental Study of the Beginning Reading of Deaf Mutes. New York: Columbia University Press, 1927.)
Glenn Doman (Teach Your Baby to Read), who was convinced that seeing meanings in written words was the easiest of all the language processes – even easier than understanding speech! – taught scores of deaf babies to understand print, by showing their parents how to do the teaching. Reading words is easier than hearing them because the print can be big, bold and coloured; babies can look at the words for as long as they need to (spoken words are gone as soon as they are uttered); and the gaps between words are clearer on the page than in speech.
We can employ the same ways to help deaf children understand print that we do with hearing children, keeping in mind that it is the physical context which will make the print meaningful, rather than the matching spoken words. Of course we should make full use of the youngsters’ residual hearing, and say the words aloud at the same time. (What will happen then is that the written words will help to make the spoken words meaningful – rather than the other way round – so the process will help the children to understand speech as well as print…)
Understanding print
We can show deaf pupils how to stick labels on objects around the house, writing the words in big, bold, coloured letters. Help them to match identical words with each other, and to find additional chairs/tables/sofas/windows for the same labels.
They can be helped to understand short sentences, by suiting the action to the words. E.g. ‘Sit down’, ‘Mummy is sitting down’, ‘[Child’s name] is sitting down’, etc.
Read colourful picture books with deaf children just as you would with hearing children, pointing to the words as you go along, and helping the child to identify words which are already familiar. Praise him/her enthusiastically for her progress.
It should be possible to make films of attractive books, with subtitles in big print. A voiceover reads the subtitles aloud, while a small colourful dot hops from word to word to help the children follow. These films can be shown to whole groups of children at once.
The basic theme is to immerse the children in meaningful print for all you are worth, without worrying about whether they can demonstrate their understanding. So long as they can see the words, and think of their meanings at the same time, they cannot help but learn them, because that is how the brain works.
(You can also use sign language to help deaf children to read! Use the appropriate signs to make clear the meanings of particular written words, and this will boost a child’s reading ability no end.)
Sounding out written words
You can teach phonics to a child who is profoundly deaf. This is because she can be aware of the feeling of producing a sound, even though she cannot hear the sound she is uttering. Then she can match the appropriate letter or letters with that feeling of utterance.
Start off by showing her the Alphabet Book in my series Alphabet Magic – The Tallying Approach to Phonics.
Book One –
The Alphabet Book
Book Two –
The Book of Combinations
Book Three –
The Story of Alphabet Magic
Read the book with your child as you would if she could hear. Point to the pictures and to the words, saying the words so the child can see your lips. Help her to point to the picture and then run her finger underneath the matching words.
Sets of word cards to go with this phonic programme are available from me direct (see Section 4, What about phonics?) – or you could make your own. Show your child the word card with ‘apple’ on it, and help her to match it with the word on the page, and the picture. When she can do this by herself, you will know that she is understanding the word.
Whenever the child produces a particular sound, e.g. ‘bŭ’, show her the matching letter in the Alphabet Book, immediately, and encourage her to repeat the sound while she is looking at the letter. (Even if she cannot hear the sound she is making, she is still learning to link the feeling of producing the sound with its corresponding letter.) After a while you will be able to show her the letter first, and she will respond by making the sound. Whenever she produces sound blends, e.g. ‘bĭ’, show her the matching letters if they are in the book, or write them down yourself. Carry on doing this until she can say aloud all the letters, blends and words listed in the book, and show her how to ‘tally’ (sound out) the words in Set 1a and Set 1b. Teach her to read the Book of Combinations in the same way.
Learning phonics is like learning to speak
In fact she is using the very same language processes as a hearing baby! The only difference is that she is using patterns of shapes as her starting point, rather than patterns of sounds. She is learning to see meanings in written words (which is just like hearing meanings in spoken words). Then, she is learning to talk by mapping her feelings of utterance on to meaningful written words.
Hearing babies learn to pronounce spoken words by mapping their feelings of utterance on to meaningful heard words. They discover how to produce particular sounds when they start babbling, at about five months. As they waggle their lips and tongue, these rather interesting noises come out. To begin with, a baby probably doesn’t recognize that he is producing the sounds himself. But quite soon he notices that the same sounds happen whenever he has the same feelings in his mouth and voice. This is exciting – it means that he can produce sounds at will. When he pulls his lips apart, with a bit of voice behind them, a rather nifty ‘bŭ’ sound emerges. And if he does it again, the same thing happens! Very satisfying. Waggling things around at the back of his throat produces a nice gooey sound, and there seem to be all sorts of noises he can make with his tongue.
What he is doing is ‘tallying’! He is matching items of sense data in pairs – the sound of a ‘b’ with the feeling of producing it; a ‘gŭ’ sound with its matching vocal sensation, and so on. Only when these associations have been firmly made can he begin to imitate sounds. His mother leans over his cot, going ‘ba – ba – ba’ in the inane way mothers have, and he finds this delightful because the sounds his mother is making are just like the sounds he has already learned to make himself. (His mother, at first, is imitating him!) So he can go ‘ba – ba – ba’ in reply. The two of them can have a fine old time, going ‘ba – ba – ba’ and ‘gu – gu – gu’ at each other for minutes on end. Even better: his babbling game has now spread out to include someone else.
In the meantime, and as a separate process, the hearing baby has been learning that noises can be words – they can convey meanings. And some of these words he has produced himself, quite by accident. One day it dawns that if a particular pattern of sounds, coming out of his own mouth, is very like a pattern of sounds bearing its cargo of meaning into his ears, he too can invest that pattern of sounds with the same meaning. He too can utter it as an undivided whole, and think the meaning through it. It is no longer a random pattern of sounds; now, it has become a word. Now, he is not just babbling any longer: now, he can talk.
His first words are only close approximations of the words he hears, because he is seizing on heard words which most closely resemble his own chance utterances. But, gradually, he learns how to make his own spoken words ‘sound right’ at his first attempt, by listening closely to the meaningful words coming into his ears. He isolates the initial sound in a word and matches it with the appropriate vocal sensation, then the next sound, then the next and the next, tallying heard sounds with vocal sensations all the way along the word. In this manner his language coincides ever more closely with the language he hears, until his pronunciations are virtually indistinguishable from everybody else’s. (See my book Conquer Dyslexia, pp. 24-29.)
A deaf baby can do exactly the same sort of thing as the hearing child, by isolating the first letter or letters in a written word, and matching that with the appropriate vocal sensation. Then the next letter, and the next, tallying them with her own vocal sensations, until she has uttered the whole, meaningful word.
She can learn phonics, just as she can learn to understand print. For her, phonics is not a ‘reading method’ – but it will most definitely help her learn to talk.
If your child has only a partial hearing loss, fine, help her to use her hearing ability to understand as much spoken language as possible. Teaching her to understand print and read aloud will complement, stimulate and extend her comprehension and use of speech. But you don’t have to wait until she can talk before teaching her to read – she can learn both at the same time.
Cued speech
You can help a deaf child to lipread more accurately by using ‘cued speech’ when you talk to her. The difficulty with lipreading is that many different sounds ‘look’ exactly the same on the lips, so both understanding and reproduction of words by the lipreader tend to be imprecise.
Cued speech was devised by Dr Orin Cornett to get over this problem. The hands are used as ‘cues’ at the side of the face, in conjunction with normal speech, to clear up ambiguities, and make plain exactly which sounds are being uttered. This makes far more complex language accessible to the deaf lipreader, and her own speech can also be corrected by the appropriate use of ‘cues’. Deaf children who are exposed to cued speech begin to take a real interest in learning to lipread, and once their understanding is fluent, they can lipread more readily even when the speaker is not cueing.
When cued speech has become familiar, you can of course use it to help a child learn to translate written words into sounds. ‘Cue’ any written word, or letters, that you want her to say, and by this simple means you will enable her to match the shapes on the page with the precisely similar ‘vocal sensations’.
For more information, write to: The National Centre for Cued Speech, 29/30 Watling Street, Canterbury CT1 2UD. Tel: 01227 450767.
Learning to write
Again, help your child to write as you would if she could hear. When she can sound out letters and words, show them to her in cursive script, and teach her to trace and copy them. Encourage her to sound out the words whenever she writes them – now you will be using another sense (the sense of ‘handwriting feelings’) to stimulate her speech and language development in general. (See Section 10, Different word forms, similar routes – a complete theory of language.)