Literacy and Deafness: Listening and Spoken Language

Prospects are changing for individuals with hearing loss. Infants and toddlers discovered to be deaf or hard of hearing can be aided or implanted with state-of-the-art technology, and the people in the childrens lives can learn to enrich and accentuate their access to sound and help them learn to listen. These children can learn more than one spoken language and can learn to read, write, sing, and play musical instruments. Deafness in all its audiogrammatic forms can be treated in one way or another. Unless someone chooses deafness for a particular child, no child needs to remain in silence or even in partial sound. This book is about learning to listen and speak in order to learn to read and write. It deals with the evidence of persistent low literacy levels in many individuals with hearing loss and with evidence of higher literacy levels in those with hearing loss who have learned to listen. At a time when technology is racing along to produce ever better access to sound, this book attempts to pull together the dominant literacy research done in the hearing world and apply it to the world of the deaf and hard of hearing who can now experience all sorts of sound. The author makes the argument that helping a child learn to listen is the best insurance that he or she will learn to read and write. It comes from both a research-based and a personal point of view.