Bill
Gates said, "The first five years have so much to do with how the next 80
turn out.” Language
acquisition – or the lack of an acquired language – ultimately affects the
child’s life outcomes, not just in their cognitive and social-emotional
developments but also in their literacy skills, academic achievements, mental
health, and employment opportunities. Research studies now tell us that early
childhood is the most important and pivotal period for language learning and
acquisition for all children. The consequences of delayed or deprived language
development are far more devastating for Deaf children.
Nyle
DiMarco – the current ASL-Deaf winner of Dancing with the Stars caused not one
but two firestorms. The first was when he showed the world how Deaf people can
dance without music, and the second when he -- as a celebrity spokesperson for
Language Equity and Acquisition for Deaf Kids (LEAD-K) – announced that we need
to end Language Deprivation Syndrome for Deaf children. His bold proclamation caused
an internal firestorm within two polarizing camps of oral proponents and
ASL-Deaf advocates. ASL advocates are fighting myriad battles, but for this
op-ed article, the focus will be on dealing with the ideological belief that
Deaf children and their families should not learn American Sign Language (ASL)
along with English and with the consequences of their beliefs on the education
of Deaf students.
Deaf
children frequently arrive at Kindergarten with inadequate language skills and
subsequently struggle with grade-level reading and math (O’Connell, 2007). That
is definitely not a result of their hearing status but mainly because they have
mostly deficient language development due to parents not using sign language at
home. Furthermore, statistics for Deaf students, generally speaking, are not
readily available because their scores are lumped with all other Special
Education students’ scores. However, in California due to a legislative mandate
in 2007, we were able to cull all of 12,000+ Deaf students’ scores. Only 8% of
Deaf and 15% of Hard of Hearing K-12 students were reading at grade-level, and
only 10% Deaf and 18% of Hard of Hearing students were performing grade-level
math. Today, we have no idea how well our DHH students are doing. If hearing
and speech skills were important, explain the dismal scores of our hard of
hearing students. From a governmental accountability point of view, that should
not be acceptable especially since the solutions to ending Language Deprivation
Syndrome are readily available and fiscally efficient.
Currently,
the interventional services provided to families with Deaf children do not
include language services. National Center
for Hearing Assessment and Management (NCHAM) is a $46 million federally-funded
program that “ensures that all infants and toddlers with hearing loss are
identified as early as possible and provided with timely and appropriate
audiological, educational, and medical interventions.” Instead of a current focus
on hearing and speech development only, Deaf children ages 0-5 need to also acquire
language visually, naturally, and easily, for which using sign language would
provide. They also need to access their languages, both American Sign
Language (ASL) and English as early as possible.
How
can we expect our Deaf student to achieve educationally with deprived, delayed,
or deficient language development and skills? The deaf child must know a
language before they can facilitate learning to read (Goldin-Meadow and
Mayberry, 2002).
Dr.
Sanjay Gulati, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a psychiatrist for
Deaf children and adolescents, said, “Language deprivation and
consequently brain damage is the single greatest risk to deaf babies and
children” (Glickman & Gulati, 2003). When deaf people are language deprived – or delayed, their
cognitive, social, and emotional skills are impacted. Their opportunities for
higher education, employment, and pursuit of happiness are likewise affected. With the traditional and misguided intervention
focus only on hearing and speech skills development, our Deaf children, who are
mostly visually oriented, do not get healthy and full access to language.
Meier
(1991) showed how a focus on Deaf children’s speech development again and again
-- to this very day -- robs Deaf children of a language, either American Sign
Language (ASL) or English.
Acquiring
speech is for them a long, frustrating, and difficult endeavor, but many of
them have had no alternative but to try…the education of the deaf emphasized
speech training to the exclusion of sign language. Hearing parents were discouraged
from signing to their children and were told that the use of a sign language
would impede their child’s progress in learning English. Consequently, the deaf
children of hearing parents, who were deprived of exposure to spoken language
by biology, were deprived of exposure to sign language by society (p. 62).
Mayberry (2002)
discussed the impacts of sign language acquisition on Deaf children’s cognitive
development and reading in Deaf children. She wrote:
The
language difficulties endemic to the population of children who are born deaf
are completely preventable and caused by a lack of exposure to accessible
linguistic input at the right time in human development, namely infancy and
early childhood. The language difficulties caused by postponing exposure to
accessible language until late childhood and adolescence are permanent and not
ameliorated by substituting sign language for spoken language at an older age.
Deaf children’s significantly delayed language development, in sign or speech,
leads to poor reading achievement... (p.101).
Other researchers studied the
benefits of an early sign language acquisition by Deaf children for their
cognitive development, theory of mind, and literacy. Goldin-Meadow &
Mayberry (2001) wrote, “Deaf children who are proficient in ASL are often
better English readers than deaf children who are not, despite the fact that
ASL is structured very differently from English” (p. 227).
With
the advent of hearing technology, there is some research that show how hearing
technology does not deliver as much benefits as originally believed. Nittrouer et al (2012) concluded that those
children with hearing technology would still need full language support and
stimulation to help them with their literacy development. Cochlear implantation
is not a panacea for language acquisition or for academic achievements.
Humphries et
al (2012) outlined how linguistic deprivation of Deaf children causes harm to
society in which Deaf adults exhibit evidence of illiteracy, unemployment, and
poverty. Humphries et al (2012) also discussed the medical and hearing
professionals’ misinformation about the supposed disadvantages of a sign
language. In many cases, these professionals’
coercing behavior and abnegation of trust to parents of Deaf children have done
lasting harm to the Deaf children. There are other research studies that show
repercussions from misinformation in the areas of adolescent mental health,
academic outcomes, employment, and quality of life for Deaf people.
Our history of polarizing ideologies between signed and spoken
languages initially started in 1880 when the second International Congress on
the Education of the Deaf declared that oral language was superior to signed
language when educating deaf students (Gallaudet, 1880). Out of 164 delegates,
only one was Deaf. Today, 136 years later, we still have to fight an entrenched
system to allow all Deaf babies and toddlers acquire a signed language. Hence, the
LEAD-K and its celebrity spokesperson, Nyle DiMarco see a need to advocate that
all Deaf children and toddlers become Kindergarten-ready through language
acquisition or bilingually through both American Sign Language and English.
Only
through appropriate interventional language services will our Deaf children be
able to attain the academic milestones that they are capable of achieving.
References
Gallaudet, E. M. (1880). The Milan Convention. Retrieved from
http://saveourdeafschools.org/edward_miner_gallaudet_the_milan_convention.pdf
Glickman, N. S. and Gulati, Sanjay.
(2003). Mental health care of deaf people.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Goldin-Meadow, S. & Mayberry, R. I. (2001). How do
profoundly deaf children learn to read? Learning Disabilities Research and
Practice (Special
issues: Emergent and early literacy: Current status and research directions), 16,
221-228.
Humphries,
T., Kushalnagar, P., Mathur, G., Napoli, D. J., Padden, C., Rathmann, C., &
Smith, S. R. (2012). Language acquisition for deaf children: Reducing the harms
of zero tolerance to the use of alternative approaches. Harm Reduction Journal, 9,
16. doi:10.1186/1477-7517-9-16
Mayberry, R. I. (2002). Cognitive development of deaf
children: The interface of language and perception in neuropsychology. In S. J.
Segaolwitz & I. Rapin (Eds.) Handbook of Neuropsychology, 2nd
Edition, Volume 8, Part II, 71-107. 2nd Edition. Amsterdam: Elsvier.
National Center on Hearing Assessment and
Management (NCHAM). (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.infanthearing.org/
Nittrouer, S., Caldwell, A., Lowenstein, J. H., Tarr, E.,
& Holloman, C. (2012). Emergent literacy in kindergartners with cochlear
implants. Ear and Hearing, 33(6), 683–697.
http://doi.org/10.1097/AUD.0b013e318258c98e
