Ninety-five per cent of profoundly deaf school-leavers only reach a reading-age of nine. This functional illiteracy means that even the nuances of stories from basic tabloid newspapers are beyond the reach of many deaf adults. Recent surveys show that even since Conrad's (1979) seminal work, The Deaf School Child, not much has changed, even though much deaf education in the UK has metamorphosed from an oral to a signing basis. It would appear that whether a school's language policy is sign or speech based is irrelevant to helping deaf children become competent readers.

Poor language exposure
About one in every 2,700 children is born with profound hearing loss and even more suffer lower levels of hearing loss. Ninety per cent of deaf children are born to hearing parents where deafness will be completely unexpected. Too often, hearing loss is not diagnosed until children are 12 months old, when they will have missed out on a crucial year of initial language acquisition.

Only a few hearing families of deaf children learn competent manual communication and the majority of children experience extremely poor social and family interaction.

In most families communication between parent and deaf child is through oral language. Less than half the information needed to discriminate the different sounds of English speech is available from lip-movements. Thus, the process of understanding spoken language is extremely difficult for the deaf child. This often leads to a low intensity of language stimulation and in turn to a low intensity language exposure for the deaf child.

The clearest evidence that deaf children have poor language development comes from an examination of the level of vocabulary. The majority of deaf children starting school aged four or five years have a vocabulary level of fewer than 500 words. In comparison, hearing children at this age have an expressive vocabulary of 3,000-5,000 words.

Phonological awareness
Many people are surprised at the idea that deaf children could have such problems in learning to read, and this is because they- underestimate the crucial role of language sound, i.e. phonological awareness, in learning to read. Familiarity with nursery rhymes enhances children's sensitivity to component sounds in language, which leads to better progress in reading and spelling.

It seems unlikely that deaf children, who cannot hear, could have access to phonological skills that rely on sound. This represents something of a conundrum when thinking about how best to teach reading to deaf children. However, I and my colleague, Usha Goswami, (2000) found that some deaf children can develop some phonological skills through exposure to language, albeit limited, even when their speech ability and auditory experience is poor. Young deaf children had to pick a nonsense word that 'sounded' like the name of a picture. For example, under a picture of a door was a list of nonsense words (e.g., "daw", "diw", "dak", "taw") from which the correct homophone had to be picked. The children's accuracy rate was 64 per cent, which was far above the 25 per cent chance level. This result showed that deaf children were able to assemble the phonemes of the nonsense words to generate a phonological sequence for the word. This phonological representation was then used for comparisons with the real word (i.e. "door").

This startling result poses a difficult question about the origins of phonological awareness. The fact that even deaf children seem to develop phonological awareness in the most adverse circumstances, underlines its importance in language development and consequently in acquiring literacy skills. Phonological structures can develop for either sign or oral languages. There have been several analyses of the language development of deaf children of deaf parents. For these children their native language is sign and they rarely have access to speech. They follow the same developmental path for language as hearing children. They can analyse and structure sign language into grammatical, morphological and phonological components. Deaf children face enormous hurdles in language development; they are unlikely to develop competent literacy skills. An enriched language experience is the key to developing phonological skills and to becoming literate. Improving the level of language exposure for the young deaf infant is also the key to overcoming the social and emotional isolation experienced by many deaf children.

Perhaps the debate about the use of signing or oral language for educating deaf children is not as important as thinking about what is the best way of maximising language input. Teaching strategies that enhance the phonological awareness of deaf children may help deaf children become literate. However, the best chances for the deaf child learning how to read is to ensure that they have a rich language experience during infancy.
 

Reference and further reading Conrad, R (1979) The Deaf School Child. London: Harper & Row. Sterne, A and Goswami, UC (2000) 'Phonological awareness of syllables, onset-rime units and phonemes in deaf children' in Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry & Allied Disciplines, vol. 41, no. 5, July 2000, pp. 609-626.

Subscribe to Literacy Today