Learning to read as a deaf/hoh person

stephaniep21

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The other day, I saw another post that mentioned that most deaf people don't read phonetically. This makes sense since phonetics involves decoding by sounding out the words. However, I'm wondering what methods deaf people use to learn to read.
 
For me, since I was only hoh at the time, my parents just read to me a lot and my brothers did what they could, but it was very repetitious.

For my daughter, it was years of speech therapy, lots of tears and then the light blub went off with books on tape. She has a mild hearing loss and APD.
 
I really don't remember how I learned, but I remember it being traumatic. It's one of my earliest memories of authority figures causing me to feel fear and betrayal and knowing that something was wrong but not what because nobody bothered to tell me that I was supposed to hear better than I did.
It was kindergarten, third semester for me because I'd just moved to the US from Argentina and the school year is opposite in the North and South hemispheres and they'd elected to hold me back half a year instead of skip half a year. I did not yet have HA, had not yet had any speech therapy, and my teacher had not been informed that I was HOH. I remember sitting at the table with my teacher with a book open in front of me and the teacher telling me that she knew that I knew what it said and if I didn't read it aloud to her immediately she was going to put me in time out. I recognized enough of the words to know the basic gist of what was going on on that page, but I couldn't sound them out and to me written and spoken words weren't the same word yet. I don't remember what happened after that, but that one snapshot of frustration and emotional pain and fear of punishment for something I couldn't help is burned into my memory.
 
It was grand! My great aunt taught me with cards that had words, and pictures of the objects represented by the words.

The labels were also on many things in my home.

Whole word method. Most successful deaf readers learn this way.
 
Whole word method. Most successful deaf readers learn this way.

From my linguistics background, I'm always pretty dismayed when people want their children to learn via the "whole word method", since that's not really been an effective way for students to learn to read for the first time. But I admit that I never considered that's only true for hearing children! It would make a lot more sense with deaf children!

I feel strangely pleased that the rather maligned "whole word method" has a place in education, but it's just usually misplaced — not matched up to the group of students who would most benefit from it.

Thanks for mentioning it, Bottesini!
 
I really don't remember how I learned, but I remember it being traumatic. It's one of my earliest memories of authority figures causing me to feel fear and betrayal and knowing that something was wrong but not what because nobody bothered to tell me that I was supposed to hear better than I did.
It was kindergarten, third semester for me because I'd just moved to the US from Argentina and the school year is opposite in the North and South hemispheres and they'd elected to hold me back half a year instead of skip half a year. I did not yet have HA, had not yet had any speech therapy, and my teacher had not been informed that I was HOH. I remember sitting at the table with my teacher with a book open in front of me and the teacher telling me that she knew that I knew what it said and if I didn't read it aloud to her immediately she was going to put me in time out. I recognized enough of the words to know the basic gist of what was going on on that page, but I couldn't sound them out and to me written and spoken words weren't the same word yet. I don't remember what happened after that, but that one snapshot of frustration and emotional pain and fear of punishment for something I couldn't help is burned into my memory.

Wow...that is horrible. I am a teacher and behavior like this from teachers disgusts me. I wouldn't treat my 12th graders that way, let alone kindergardeners. What is wrong with people?
 
Wow...that is horrible. I am a teacher and behavior like this from teachers disgusts me. I wouldn't treat my 12th graders that way, let alone kindergardeners. What is wrong with people?

That wasn't an isolated incident. There are a lot similarly burnt into my memory of teachers making the assumption that I had the same information as my classmates and that my failure to do what I was supposed to was willful misbehavior.
Got held after school in 1st grade for allegedly refusing to apologize for bumping into a teacher and then lying about it. (I did apologize! Right when I brushed up against her! I had poor volume control and didn't realize that I was speaking too softly for the amount of background noise because it felt the same to me!) I couldn't understand why they were angry at me, because I did what I was supposed to but they claimed I didn't.
Got in trouble on a regular basis all through elementary school for not starting and stopping the "mad minute" worksheets when told to.
Got detention in 6th grade for "not paying attention" and double-checking whose paper I was peer-grading because I missed someone else saying they had the person I thought I did. (There were two Sams in the class and the handwriting was messy so I thought it was the wrong one and didn't realize that there was a mixup and I needed to double check.)
Got detention in 7th grade for missing some instruction (still don't know what) because I was copying down the homework rather than looking at the teacher's face.
 
That wasn't an isolated incident. There are a lot similarly burnt into my memory of teachers making the assumption that I had the same information as my classmates and that my failure to do what I was supposed to was willful misbehavior.
Got held after school in 1st grade for allegedly refusing to apologize for bumping into a teacher and then lying about it. (I did apologize! Right when I brushed up against her! I had poor volume control and didn't realize that I was speaking too softly for the amount of background noise because it felt the same to me!) I couldn't understand why they were angry at me, because I did what I was supposed to but they claimed I didn't.
Got in trouble on a regular basis all through elementary school for not starting and stopping the "mad minute" worksheets when told to.
Got detention in 6th grade for "not paying attention" and double-checking whose paper I was peer-grading because I missed someone else saying they had the person I thought I did. (There were two Sams in the class and the handwriting was messy so I thought it was the wrong one and didn't realize that there was a mixup and I needed to double check.)
Got detention in 7th grade for missing some instruction (still don't know what) because I was copying down the homework rather than looking at the teacher's face.

It makes me so angry that so many crappy teachers exist. Any decent teacher makes their classroom a safe place for all students and ensures that every student has what they need. One of my favorite quotes is "Being fair is not treating everyone the same, but making sure that everyone has what they need." Clearly, your teachers didn't give you what you needed in school.
 
Clearly, your teachers didn't give you what you needed in school.

To be fair, they were not told that I was HOH. My parents did their best to cover it up and didn't tell the school, and I was one of those obnoxiously smart kids who really didn't need to pay attention in class to learn the material because I could absorb it from seeing it in a book or on a worksheet once, so once I could read I certainly wasn't struggling academically, I just missed instructions. Because I was getting good grades, nobody probed deep enough to discover that there was stuff missing from my file.
 
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