The Spectrum

Tomorrow morning I start the summer reading mentor program our school district hosts for deaf and hard of hearing students. I will be working with a little boy who is about kindergarten/first grade age. I have not yet met this student but I've been told that he is "oral", which in our district really means that no one at home signs and he has not yet learned how to sign for himself. Our district doesn't have any strictly "oral" profoundly deaf students; the people in charge downtown have at least figured that out, as much as they are clueless concerning other topics. I say this because I've seen oralism in a school district that ran a strictly oral deaf education program. Needless to say, I was horrified by the whole experience.

So, when people in my district say that a deaf student is oral, I know it to mean that the student has not yet started signing as a means of communication, not that the student's parents want to raise the student to be an auditory/oral-only communicator. Tomorrow should be interesting because I have no idea what this child's communication skills will be like and I don't know what to expect when we sit down to start reading a book together. I have prior experience working with a different boy, around the same age, who had no communication capabilities. Seriously. Imagine a six year old child who cannot even pick out a red crayon if asked.

How do I get to work with students who have no language? Well, it's a long and complicated answer, but a good deal of it concerns parents and the professionals they are introduced to at the onset of their child's deafness. Detection of deafness in infants is getting better, but there are still many children who are not diagnosed as being deaf until they are a year or more old. Traditionally, parents have not even thought that their child could have been born deaf until they realize that their child is not learning to speak. By the time the child is diagnosed, a huge delay in language learning has occurred. Often, when parents learn their child is deaf or hard of hearing they are only introduced to professionals who have a medical view of deafness. This means that these professionals view deafness as an ailment that needs to be treated and cured. The child is then fit with hearing aids, possibly with the aim of undergoing surgery for a cochlear implant. Learning sign language is usually not a priority, because professionals with a medical view of hearing loss tend to believe that relying on a visual language hinders the development of a spoken one.

However the process unfolds, it is not uncommon for these deaf and hard of hearing children to arrive at school with NO language base. They have nothing with which to build concepts and apply new knowledge. These children cannot communicate even simple needs.

Of course, that is one extreme. Unfortunately, I've only worked with two students who came from the other extreme. They were brother and sister and were born deaf to deaf parents. I had the experience of interpreting for the sister in her Spanish III class and her English class where they were reading Dante's Inferno. She graduated a few years ago and is attending KSU, majoring in nursing. The brother graduated this year and is going to attend NTID which is part of RIT. He plans on majoring in civil engineering. Oh, the advantage that having access to language from birth gives one.

Most of the deaf and hard of hearing children I know fall in between those two extremes. Most of the kids are pretty fluent at signing (not necessarily in ASL, though) and they do alright when they're at school.