Unlocking the Curriculum
Johnson et al.
kindergarten. Because most deaf children are born into all-hearing families, they tend to be
addressed in the home only in spoken English, a language and modality which may be almost
totally inaccessible to them. Upon entering school they are consequently already well behind
hearing age mates in both language development and the cognitive and social development that
comes from interacting with parents and peers using a natural language. It follows that such
children will also be substantially behind their hearing peers in the acquisition of the knowledge
and information expected to be held by children of their age.
In all of these respects, children who have been addressed largely in spoken English will
typically also be behind their deaf age mates who have acquired ASL naturally. These children
generally come from families with deaf parents or older deaf siblings, and typically have a native
competence in natural sign language and several years of experience conversing about the world
with adults and peers.
We contend that education programs for deaf children in this country deny the linguistic
needs of either of these groups. To our knowledge, all programs in the United States continue to
present curricular material in a form that is not accessible to either of these categories of children.
Material presented in spoken English is inaccessible to any deaf child, including even those with
less than profound hearing losses. If deaf children could deal with plain spoken English, there
would be no need for special educational treatment. That is, because the majority of deaf children
fail when only spoken English is available, our country has long recognized the necessity of special
programming. For reasons we will discuss below, material presented in "Signed English" is usually
equally inaccessible.
Oral programs use spoken English as the sole mode of instruction. Although residential
oral schools have greatly declined in number, there are still many oral, public school, day programs
for educating deaf students. The underlying assumption of such programs is that children will
acquire spoken English through seeing and hearing it, and that this language acquisition will lead
to more complete integration with the "hearing world" (Van Uden, 1968; Miller, 1970; Northcott,
1981). They have traditionally failed because deaf children cannot hear and because only a small
part of the spoken English signal may be comprehended visually. Competent lipreading requires
prior knowledge of the language and being able to use that knowledge (and partial hearing) to
supply missing information. Thus, children who have substantial residual hearing and children
who have become deaf after the acquisition of spoken English typically have been more successful
in oral programs. Even with such advantages, it takes years of concentrated, individualized training
for a child to develop reliable skills in lipreading and speech, usually to the exclusion of a
substantial portion of ordinary curricular material.
For a profoundly and prelingually deaf child with little or no prior language experience,
oral education is expected to teach not only speech and lipreading, but also to provide the
fundamental model for acquisition of the English language. Children are expected to acquire, to
understand, and to use spoken English simultaneously.
But more critical to the educational process is the fact that the same children are expected
from the first day to receive, process, and learn all curricular content through spoken English
produced by their teachers. It is not surprising that most deaf children do poorly in this
environment. It appears to us to be unrealistic to think that a person who does not know a language
and who cannot receive it in the form presented could learn much from someone trying to
communicate in that language.
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