How do children learn to read?

To be able to read with the ease of a typical hearing child, a deaf child should have two ways to attack words. The first is called ‘lexical access’where a child recognises the word from a list of all the words he has learned. This ‘whole word approach’means the deaf child must learn each word individually in its written form. The second method is called ‘phonological access’where a child must have some way of coding words based on how they sound. Cued Speech gives the deaf child this kind of access as each sound within a word is represented by the combination of cues and lipshapes. This means that deaf children can ‘sound out’words they do not know, and also work out how to spell new words that they have seen cued.

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We need someone with some time on their hands to sit down and makecomparisons from year to year and follow each child's progress. I did that project on a two year comparison a year ago and found including those who were on the low end, all children had shown at least a 1.2 year gain during the intervening year, some as much as three years growth

....the earlier and more consistent the use of Cued Speech, the better the results. However, even those children whose parents useEnglish as a second language and who only get Cued Speech in school gain benefits. They are still learning to read better and earlier than children from similar circumstances who are taught with sign language.

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Holly - One Family’s Story

We have two profoundly deaf sons and we started to learn Cued Speech when our older son wasabout nine months old. As I cued, our son’s receptive vocabulary grew very quickly. By the time he was two years old he understood a lot of simple sentences and by three years four months he was using sentences like “I want to go downstairs to help Daddy”.

Typically, sentences would include all the ‘little’words but few, if any, consonants and sentences would always be spoken not cued. He was also starting to read. Some time before his third birthday I started to read directly to him from books rather than talking about pictures. He became very interested in the words, particularly words that were new to him, and he loved nonsense words. As he began to read I started to show him that some of the letters represented sounds and he very quickly made the association between the sounds that hecould not hear, but knew existed because of the cues, and the letters.

Both of our children started to read very early, around the age of three, and both started school with good understanding of language, nearly age appropriate. Both children have attended their local, hearing school and each have had a full-time Cued Speech transliterator. Their peripatetic teacher has regularly tested their reading ages, vocabulary and grammar. Their reading ages have continued to be one or two years ahead of their hearing contemporaries.

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I have 2 hearing children.

I read and sign my children when they were toddlers. I gave their favorite books to child minder to read them twice to three times a week due speech development. The children knows the difference between their parents and child minder because we sign with voice to them which different as child minder.

Now they are 12 (soon to be 13) and 9 (soon to be 10) and love to read... They read real alot. Their teachers told us that my children are best reader of classroom.


I would recommend to show deaf or hearing children how to read at earlier age.