Read with ASL

Raising a Deaf Reader

by LI

Disclaimer: My daughter “M” was born about 40 years ago. There was no newborn testing for hearing loss, no internet, no sign language videotapes, hearing aids were analog, CIs were very new and only came with one channel. There are a lot more resources available today! I also have some opinions which may not be applicable to all kids.

We had for those days a very rapid and smooth identification at 15 months. At this point she had no language, and it was hard to get her to maintain eye contact for any length of time. We started signing as soon as we could get some direction as to how to go about it, almost immediately. We began with Signed English, aka Conceptually Accurate Signed English, eventually morphing into PSE with ASL flourishes.

Reading to young children is to my mind one of the most important ways to create a future reader. I’d already been trying to interest M in books, with little success. The only one she’d sit still for was “The Large and Growly Bear”—I used my gruffest voice for him, and either it got through to her ears (we would later learn that she has a “corner” audiogram with a tiny bit of residual hearing below 1000 Hz) or she could feel the vibrations in my chest as she sat back against it. Mom points at the big brown thing, and her chest buzzes. Whee.

The reading got put on hold for a few months while we established our new communication mode, then resumed! I started with a book I wrote myself, using our still limited shared vocabulary and pictures of M doing everyday activities.

Soapbox #1, my reading-to-kids philosophy: good for language development, imagination, and knowledge base, but primarily entertainment. Get the kids interested and hooked on books before they are old enough to defend themselves! I could never get “into” the idea of interrupting the story to ask questions or discuss what might happen next as suggested by the “experts.” However, we’d sometimes act out the story or do after-reading activities—such as creating a map of Oz with tiny pictures of the events in the story.

This program of nearly daily reading was for me, too. I’d look up the signs I needed, scrawl reminders on Post-It notes and stick them in the book. When we got tired of that book, the Post-It notes spent some time on my kitchen cabinet doors and I’d review vocabulary while cooking. The more signs I learned, the more M would learn.

M attended a school for the deaf as a day student (later, part-time residential for sports, and part-time mainstreaming at the local public high school) and once she started to read, I began to have her read to me, but continued to read longer and more complex books to her. One of our favorites was the Ladybird books Puddle Lane series (no longer in print) --the child reads one page, and the adult reads the facing page.

We kept television a small part of our lives but got a caption decoder long before M started to read ($300 from Sears!). M started to connect the appearance of captions with the fact that someone was talking on screen. Later, I figured out how to make tapes with the captions burned in so they would stay on the screen long enough for M and me to read them together. Nowadays, captions “stick” for streaming media, at least, so this should be much easier for today’s parents.

The advantage of not just leaving it all to the school is that you can see where problems lie and address them, even as an “untrained” parent. During second grade, I noticed that M couldn’t spell anything on her own, and when reading frequently confused words that had the same first letter. I requested spelling on her third grade IEP but didn’t wait—that summer I sorted the Dolch list of most common words by first letter, and we spelled and spelled, both on paper and on fingers. Not entirely appreciated by M but I think it helped.

Soapbox #2: this is one example of keeping a “homeschooling” attitude. The school for the deaf gave M things that I could not, but sometimes fell short when it came to academics. A lot depended on her teacher and classmates in any given year; some years were great, others left me muttering “social and linguistic advantages” under my breath. I regarded myself as a homeschooler who was using the school for the deaf as one resource among many, not depending on school alone.

Writing was another important avenue for learning English. We wrote our own books, home movie scripts, letters to the tooth fairy (who wrote back), thank-you notes to Grandma and Grandpa, and letters to pen pals. A couple of years of 4-H record books helped, too, and writing back and forth with hearing teammates during long waits between heats at swim meets. M discovered a love for writing stories very early (she did a lot more writing in school than her younger hearing brothers did, one thing I loved about the school for the deaf), and I learned the art of light-touch editing for spelling and grammar. One summer in high school she spent a fair amount of time writing a “novel” and requested my corrections so that she could keep improving her written English.

And on to independent reading: I think the most important point here is that not all children are interested in reading the same kinds of things. If a kid is interested enough, he or she will tackle material far above their grade level and benefit. This means providing a wide range of material, seeking out material that you suspect will pique your child’s interest, and not worrying too much about reading level—let your child decide what they can handle. The first books that got M really reading on her own were the Boxcar Children series. As she got older, she gravitated toward nonfiction. Every kid will be different and this needs to be respected! Books aren’t the only way to read—think magazines, graphic novels, comic books, captioned media, etc.

Soapbox #3: Much is made of the “average reading level of 4th grade” for deaf and hard of hearing high school graduates. Sometimes it’s even interpreted to mean “you can’t expect much more than a fourth-grade reading level.” THIS IS ERRONEOUS. Fourth grade is the median, not the average. This is a very different statistical measure—it means that half of deaf students read at or below the fourth-grade level (not good at all, of course) but that the other half read at fourth grade level or above, and some read well above that level. (If Bill Gates walks into a blue-collar bar, the average income level of the patrons soars, but their median income scarcely budges.) I feel that too many parents and unfortunately, too many professionals don’t truly understand this, resulting in low expectations for deaf children. Was M “on track” for reading development compared to her hearing peers? Heck, no. She was learning a new language, and memorizing words letter-by-letter. Her language base in Signed English helped her some with syntax and allowed her to guess at words from context, but acquiring good reading skills took longer.

I can’t entirely explain what happened as she entered high school. For the first time, I convinced her to try a mainstream class at the public school near her deaf school (the deaf school supplied interpreters and transportation, and she was showing a real interest in biology, and class offerings at the deaf school were limited for both math and science.) She’s been reluctant before (too many stories from her peers about how awful mainstream school was for them) but pointing out that algebra at the public high school would produce numerous positive changes in her schedule at the school for the deaf, chief among them being able to skip the home ec requirement for freshmen, got her on board. She was staying at school for soccer and ended up helping her deaf classmates with their algebra homework, and it took two weeks for her to realize that the public high school class was more challenging. The textbook was harder to read, too, but she now really wanted to be there, and figured it out—somehow. Second semester, she added English at the public high school, while continuing to take English at the deaf school (two completely different classes, both valuable). She planned four classes for the next fall, and over the summer attended a program in math and science for deaf students at Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska. She came back from Omaha on fire. By her Junior and Senior years, she was a nearly full-time public school student, taking all the math and science she could. The advanced biology classes used a college-level textbook. Her reading level soared. She was challenging herself all of the time, on every front, and teaching herself. Now I just had to get out of her way and let her go.

A funny thing about the reading progress of hearing students—it levels off as they get older, and year-to-year gains are smaller. For my daughter, gaining nearly two years for every year of high school wasn’t as hard as it sounds; she was just on a different kind of upward slope. Her literacy skills continued to improve in college and beyond, and even though no one was measuring them, she knew it. If your deaf or hard of hearing child is not keeping pace with hearing norms, don’t give up. Make sure they get all the support you and their school can give them and keep plugging away at it.

One more soapbox moment: #4, reading incentive programs. The school for the deaf participated in the Pizza Hut Book-It scheme. M learned to like pizza, which she had refused to eat up until that point. Her senior year, Accelerated Reader was adopted by the school for the deaf, with a required reading period set aside at the end of the day. M put her foot down. The books she wanted to read were not on the list. She ended up helping some middle-school boys with their reading, restricted by AR to books for much younger children, which were of course of no interest to them! No incentive program can replace intrinsic motivation. One subtle goal that can work is sibling or peer rivalry—M’s fifth grade teacher pulled this off when she had her class tell her how many pages they read on their own and posted their totals. No prizes were offered, but M and her best friend did their utmost to not let the others get ahead!

Oh, and reading skills are not tied to speech skills. Being able to tackle words phonetically is highly useful—M’s two hearing brothers both learned to read as if they’d known how all along and just needed to be reminded. It’s not enough by itself. When I was young, my parents enrolled both me and my younger sister in a children’s theater. I thought it was just for fun, but only recently found out that my parents had an ulterior motive. My little sister could read aloud fluently, pronouncing all the words correctly, then not be able to tell you what she’d just read about. Memorizing poems and monologues and acting them out made her concentrate on the meaning of what she was reading.

I think of reading as a three-legged stool: phonics, language and knowledge base. If one leg is missing, make sure the other two are strong. The stool may be a little tippy at first, but sight vocabulary can eventually replace that third leg. To this day I have sight vocabulary I recognize while reading but don’t know how to pronounce. And M graduated from high school with a 12+ reading level and a four-word spoken vocabulary.