How do they teach someone who's deaf from birth to read?

Question

I was just thinking about it as I looked at the fire alarm strobe here in the hotel. If they were bron deaf and could never hear anything from birth how do they know what someone is signing to them and how to put the letters together to make words? How do they know, when they are first learning, what someone is signing to them?

Answer 1

The answer to this question has taken me 4 years of undergraduate and 1 year of master's work to really be able to answer! Deaf children cannot depend on their hearing to learn to communicate, read, or write. HOWEVER, they CAN still do this. The short answer...use their 1st langauge (american sign langauge) to teach them English (reading and writing). This is the same idea as teaching a spanish speaking child to speak English by using Spanish.

SO! Rather than using phonics and speech to teach sounds and words, deaf and hard of hearing students rely on lipreading, body movement, and sign to learn language. (Visual methods). When you are teaching a deaf child letters, you would show him the letter and the handshape of that letter so that they can make that physical and visual association.

Much like hearing children, deaf children don't innately know language. They must learn it over time. Hearing kids pick up spoken language because their parents use it all day every day to communicate with them. As they grow older, they simply pick up and begin to use the language as they are encouraged to do so. The same is true with deaf children. As their parents sign to them all day every day, they will begin to pick up and use the langauge in the same way.

Many teachers of deaf children also use a method called "whole to part" teaching. An example of this would be to sign a story to the class (without showing print), then take turns re-telling the story, then add the print, break down the print to encourage good grammar and structure, then put it all back together to create a whole langauge lesson.

If you want more information, please feel free to contact me!

Answer 2

If they have had no speech instruction, not likely as speech is usually taught in school, then they will learn words by sight. How the letters are put together, patterns and letter combinations. Most of the profoundly deaf children I have taught had some kind of speech instruction and even when parents were deaf too, used mouth movements and initial consonants.
There are also many oral schools for the Deaf where speech is used exclusively.
Here's a question, why are there so many hearing illiterates?

Answer 3

When a very young child, even an infant, is learning sign language, you show them the object and the sign. As they grow older, you can show them pictures of an item and the sign. The hardest to teach are concepts, which don't really have pictures. Many of our kids entering kindergarten have had little or no formal sign training, and the teachers must teach that before they can proceed with regular lessons. I work in a high school, and still teach signs to deaf kids, even tho I'm an interpreter. Even non-deaf kids can learn sign. Our high school offers sign language classes that are accredited as a foreign language. Sign language is often used with retarded kids or autistic ones. Even animals can learn! Dogs respond better to hand signals than voice commands. I had a deaf cat that I taught a few signs to. Watch some children's shows on TV-- you will see signing there too.

Answer 4

It is extremely rare for a person to be totally deaf and blind since birth unless they have a variety of severe disabilities. People whose disabilities are that severe do not learn to communicate in any meaningful way. The majority of people who are deaf, blind or deaf/blind have some vision and some hearing. Those who do not usually became completely deaf or blind or deaf/blind over time - not at birth. They learned to communicate when they have some residual hearing or vision. There are a variety of means that people who are deaf/blind communicate. They learn to communicate the same way everyone does - repetition over time. Helen Keller, although an American, is world famous for her accomplishment as a deaf/blind woman who acquired her disability when she was a toddler. There are many movies and books about her.

Answer 5

Well see my BEST FRIEND is deaf and he know how to read because you describe the words and show examples like doll show the doll move your mouth and they will watch you. Then they try. They know as much as we do and even more. It just might take a little longer.

Answer 6

They read the words and understand the concepts. they do not make the words in to sounds in their heads as many people do.

kind of like doing math. You know that 2 + 2 = 4 as well as ** + ** = ****
the symbol, or sound, the character stands for is not as important as understanding the concept.