Quote:
Originally Posted by rockdrummer
Regarding language aquisition, I understand the deaf kids are more visual learners (obviously), and I understand the importance of aquiring language at an early age but I'm not sure I understand why learning ASL before English would be preferential. After all, at some point English should be learned so why not teach it first? It seems to me that if deaf kids have deaf parents that are fluent signers then ASL would be the natural choice but for deaf kids of hearing parents English might be a better choice for L1 language. What do you guys think and why?
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rockdrummer - I believe that a deaf child in a hearing family should be afforded the opportunity to learn/acquire the language of their family from the native users of their language, their very own family. Home is one of the richest enviroments for languae aquisition/learning. Cued Speech allows the family to model for their deaf child the phonemes of the familial spoken language, English, French, in fact 60 possible dialects! Phonemes may not be the only way to acquire language, but chances are it is the way that the family learned.
Visual access to all the phonemes of their families language! Simply awesome!
Cued speech can be and is learned in as little as 16-20 hours, the complete system! The parents are not necessarily, at this point having to learn a foreign language. Communication and inclusion possible without having to think....okay what is the sign for?????? Learning ASL for many adults is a daunting task.
IF the family has the opportunity and resources, I also believe that a fluent, native, deaf ASL role model should be the teacher of ASL, ideally also as soon as possible.
m2b