Originally Posted by Cheri

Bear did not say speech wasn't important like some of you have said, bear stated that speech is as extremely important as signs while you and the others thinks speech is just a bonus. What would happen if those deaf children have no speech skills since in deaf schools speech are only given maybe twice a week, is that enough? I don't believe so. You don't want those kids to grow up and enter the hearing world feeling awkward tenision and uncomforable with lack of speech skills. Since bi bi program is ASL all the way from the begin to the end it is use to teach English too as a second language how can ASL teach English when ASL signs itself uses ASL syntex?

While I have no problem with introducing babies to signs the first 6 month of the baby's life until there's a stage to pick up spoken language. ASL is different than English, those kids need spoken language.

The bottom line of what I'm trying to say is speech is not meant to replace ASL, speech should be very apart of the child's life as well as signs and I do think that is extremely important not the least important.

We don't need people to see that deaf people are always going to be a failture if something is limited to them. I know most of you believe that ASL is a native language for the deaf, but it does not mean you should limited their communication skills to ASL.