The new deaf generation....speaking and listening

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Making deaf children listen? Trust me, they'd much rather stare at goats. :roll:
 
Beowulf said:
Making deaf children listen? Trust me, they'd much rather stare at goats. :roll:
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That's certainly true. Hearing children, too. Regardless of language or mode. :)

Fainting goats?
 
deafskeptic said:
Who would have an easier time listening? hearing or deaf?
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deafie! because we can lip-read them despite of how noisy the environment is! the hearies could not believe this!

fainting-goat-o.gif
 
Jiro said:
deafie! because we can lip-read them despite of how noisy the environment is! the hearies could not believe this!

fainting-goat-o.gif
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You are lipreading the goats??
 
BecLak said:
And this is why I went to the extreme to say that ALL d/Deaf and even HoH would never be considered truly fluent under that definition.

Even Grendel modifies it to fit with her child. With this modification then yes many of us would be fluent even with speech. But have you noticed the change in approach, from first Koko's definition to the 'modified', in an attempt to prove me wrong?
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Here's the thing: Spoken word and written word are not the same. It isn't a matter of audio. People speak English using different styles than how they write it. It is also an issue of speed and how our brain organizes things. My written Spanish is 5x better than my oral.

An 'accent' is only loosely related to fluency. People can be totally bilingual and still have an accent until they die. (In fact, most will never lose it.)

If someone can understand my speech - even if they are hearing - and can communicate in response, they're fluent. You can be Deaf and fluent in an oral language. If a linguist were studying the issues we brought up here, they'd consider a deaf person's ability to understand the syntax and semantics of conversational English.
 
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we9_CdNPuJg]YouTube - ‪Fainting Goats‬‏[/ame]

These special "fainting goats" faint when startled or get excited too quickly and their muscles tighten up, and they "faint."
 
Beach girl said:
If you have time to read the links I posted, Grendel, I'd love to know where you'd rate your daughter on that scale. Maybe 3+? Able to converse well on many topics, but with some pronounciation errors?
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Beach Girl, you brought up kind of what I was thinking. I considered taking the FS exam once and looked into those requirements. What they are looking for is someone who can communicate in that country's 'standard' dialect, eg, high German, not low German, or proper Israeli Hebrew, not Yiddishe-accented Hebrew.

Most people will never, ever ever lose their accents. The accent decreases, but it's still there. Post-lingual acquisition means you'll not achieve the same level of accent fluency as a native speaker. Someone coming to the U.S. at age 12 and speaking English as an adult may have very proper English that sounds almost like a British accent.

Obviously, working with the CIA is a bit different than being a diplomat...I mean, a diplomat has to have fluent foreign language skills whereas a CIA operative may need to pose as a native speaker. :giggle: That usually requires someone to be bilingual from childhood. I assume this is why the FS has scales that deviate slightly from traditional linguistics.

Fluency is a matter of understanding and being understood. Someone who is from Northern Minnesota and has 'bad grammar' is still fluent.
 
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