An Aid to Literacy

According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, children with hearing loss have difficulty with all areas of academic achievement, especially reading, which can lead to feelings of isolation and unhappiness with school. Yet poor academic performance is by no means a foregone conclusion for a child with hearing loss. Many excel academically due, in part, to their families’ interventions and at-home learning strategies.

Learning and practicing Cued Speech can be a great head start for literacy. The entire family can enroll in Cued Speech classes and use it with young learners to teach English and its many phonemes using their eyes, hands and mouths. At first, cueing will be slow, but over time and with more training, the family’s ability to cue improves and communication comes freely.

To help young learners along, family members may read while cueing and play cueing games with words, changing one letter in a word to make a new word. Parents who intuitively practice what research has shown, that play with consonants and vowels helps in developing good reading skills, will nurture children who can rhyme at an early age and are more likely to be stronger readers

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http://www.drf.org/hearing_health/archive/2005/spring05_aidtoliteracy_ex.htm

will nurture children who can rhyme at an early age

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Why is this so important? I didn't undy the concept of rhyming when I was a little kid, but I taught myself to read when I was three (right after I got my first hearing aids!)

deafdyke said:

Why is this so important? I didn't undy the concept of rhyming when I was a little kid, but I taught myself to read when I was three (right after I got my first hearing aids!)

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I don't think that it's the rhyming that matters. I have horrible rhyming skills. It took me 8 hours just to come up with 5 pairs of words that rhymed in a poem that I had to write for school. Yet, I have good grammar skills.

Part of THAT is bad design on the part of the English writing system. If you ask me, our spelling system is so idiosyncratic that it might as well be a "character" system like Chinese where you could learn every word as a whole rather than phonetically. I bet if Spanish were your native language, you would've had a MUCH easier time of it.

deafdyke said:

Why is this so important?

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deafdyke,

In response to your question.....

rhyming is important because that's the way you build not only
word families (and all their structures and uses) but the sound of your
language. Rhyming is the easiest. Then you get into other sound things
like syllables and rhythm that makes your language different from or similar
to other languages.

* as a side bar - rhyming words are a perfect way to pratice CuedEnglish

loml said:

deafdyke,

In response to your question.....

rhyming is important because that's the way you build not only
word families (and all their structures and uses) but the sound of your
language. Rhyming is the easiest. Then you get into other sound things
like syllables and rhythm that makes your language different from or similar
to other languages.

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I'm going to agree with Loml. One of the reasons why deaf children have a disadvantage in learning English is that English itself is structured significantly on speech patterns.

For one small example, we write "an hour" even though the first letter following the article is a consonant and not a vowel. We say "an" because "hour" is pronounced as "our" -- and the "o" is a vowel.

Because English is structured significantly on speech, many of the methods we use to teach hearing children English are time-proven efficient ways of teaching (hearing) children English. These devices include rhymes, children's songs (The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi ho the derry o!) and many others.

Modern research, as I understand it, demonstrates a profound psychological impact when it comes to the use of rhymes, poetry and music. Not only do they offer a medium to teach English, but their usage also improves learning of english and psychosocial development. Many hearing adults can relate to happy childhood songs while the many other facets of childhood have faded.

Unfortunately, we deaf people do not have access to these devices. This is part of the reason why deaf people experience difficulty in learning language. What cued speech does is it acts one tool (and an important one) in the toolkit of a deaf child. Cued speech is Just like ASL: both are important tools and the more tools you give to a deaf child, the more you enrich the child's future.

Endymion said:

Unfortunately, we deaf people do not have access to these devices. This is part of the reason why deaf people experience difficulty in learning language. What cued speech does is it acts one tool (and an important one) in the toolkit of a deaf child. Cued speech is Just like ASL: both are important tools and the more tools you give to a deaf child, the more you enrich the child's future.

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Endymoin,

Agreeing that the access is not identical to that of hearing people, I must stress to you this point, Cued Enlgish/Cued Speech does enable a deaf child to learn and benefit from rhyming.

Cued Speech/Cued English does not alter ASL in anyway, enpowering the child to have access to at least two full languages (please note I am not calling Cued English /Cued Speech a language). I agree that Cued English/Cued Speech and ASL are both important tools, but the "tools" themselves are very different, as are the results.

loml said:

Endymoin,

... Cued Enlgish/Cued Speech does enable a deaf child to learn and benefit from rhyming.

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I agree. I hope my post above didn't sound like it was stating otherwise.

I agree that Cued English/Cued Speech and ASL are both important tools, but the "tools" themselves are very different, as are the results.

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I agree again. ASL is fantastic for cultivating social identity and has many other excellent merits. I would not expect ASL to carry the phonemes of English at all, but that's just like I would not expect Cued English to help structure a deaf child's social identity. Both are good for very different reasons.

Endymion said:

Both are good for very different reasons.

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Enymoin,

Absolutely!

I firmly believe in enpowering the family and the deaf child with as many "tools" as possible. I do not support the insistance of ASL, by some "professionals", as the first tool of choice (of course I could debate whether it is really a choice or just simply "bulldosing"). I am sure I sound like a broken record here, and if that sound was cued you could see what it "sounds" like.

Cheers!