The full article is really very interesting, arguing against separate schools for the deaf and instead towards an inclusion approach. But the Norwegian school system is so very different from that of the US that I'm not sure the same benefits would be achieved if that recommendation were slapped onto our system without full reform of our ed. system.
I have a question about this quote in the OP:
"Quote:
.............. So, it would seem that the research coming from Norway is in agreement with the top research coming from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia: despite the prevalence of early implantation, children with CI struggle in oral only educational environments and benefit greatly from bi-bi educational environments. Additionally, this research agrees that parental expectations for these children are often lowered and focused on adequate speech production rather than excellence in education."
Where did this quote above come from? I don't see it anywhere in the original article, and it actually seems to come to the opposite conclusion as that found in the article itself, which showed that parents expectations were NOT based on speech production, quite the opposite:
Quote:
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Parents' responses demonstrated expectations more in line with their children achieving an appropriate level of "participation," primarily in school and family life, rather than expectations of "excellence," particularly with the use of spoken language (Strand, 2002).
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In addition, I'm wondering if the complexity of the article's findings is coming through when you pull a few isolated quotes from the discussion of this research about Norway's pioneering kids with CIs. The data itself is just amazing, though -- did you take a look at how well these kids are doing? Impressive. Seems that the predominant, customized approach to teaching, utilizing a bilingual model in place in typical schools is very conducive to excellent results. I like this model, wish we had something like it in the US.
Quote:
What the current situation in Norway—as exemplified by the two national studies discussed in the present article—seems to imply is the possibility of a unified rather than a dualistic or divided perspective on the national future of deaf education, provided that both visual and auditory modes of communication and the languages they may form are perceived not as oppositional but as complementary.
In this sense, "excellence," as we note in the opening section of the present article, would be a marker of the quality of the learning environment and an indicator of the degree of access to communication for all students— not a referent to any single language form or communication mode.
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