Anyone willing to help me out?

[ROCK9844]

Hello to all! I am writing a research paper and am looking for opinions and experiences. Let me first introduce myself and tell you a little about the paper. I am a 38 year old police officer, married, father of two boys. I have had several encounters with deaf people over my career (17 years), and always wished I could communicate quicker and more accurately with them. As part of my college education, I had the opportunity to take ASL class. As part of that class, I am researching methods of improving the literacy rate among deaf people. As a hearing adult, even after much research, I have not heard from the group of people that matter most, deaf people who have experienced the successes and failures of the various methods of teaching deaf people to read and write English.

From my research, I can actually feel the frustration of the deaf community over the methods that have been forced on you over the years. I can also pick-up on the frustration of many researchers as they try to come up with the best program to help. I have begun to believe that there is no one best approach, but that ASL should be learned early and maintained as the first language. English should be learned second.

I have studied ASL, Oral Only, Cued Speech, Visual Phonics, SignWriting, Bi-Bi, Total Communication. Any opinions, good or bad, would be appreciated. Thank you for your input!

 

[jazzy]

Welcome to Ad.
U know not every one use ASL. Some use see signed, some use pse (which I use most), some are oralist, some use home sign,

IHMO, all deaf children with or without CI should learn ASL or any other sign language to communicate first then learn english later for reading and writing. Unfortunely many of us did not get to learn ASL first instead of they expected us to learn how to talk and read lips (it failed me). Today things have change, alike we have CI on children and they will teach them to talk first before learn ASL. I for one do not believe we should put deaf children with CI in oral programs and I wish those programs to be banned. But I am probably one of those extremist who is against any kind of oral programs because I was in it for first few years of my life and it was too late for me. I did not want it happen to them again and again. No one listen to us.

 

[suicidegirl]

personally, I believe that asl should always come first. english should be the secondary language.

I think exposure to language has a lot to do with literacy skills. I've noticed that deaf people who come from non-signing families tend to do worse when it comes to grammar/literacy. also, reading is a huge factor.

I hope that helped a bit?