A different cue for the deaf
'Cued speech' has produced strong academic results -- and a dispute
By Gadi Dechter
sun reporter
September 6, 2006
Zainab Alkebsi, 18, writes for the student newspaper at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which she attends on a full academic scholarship. Rockville native Allison Kaftan, 25, is pursuing a doctorate in English at George Washington University. Jeff Majors, 33, studies computer programming in Houston.
If they weren't deaf, they would simply be high-achievers. But when the average American deaf 18-year-old reads at just a fourth-grade level, these students' accomplishments are as noteworthy as their secret to success is controversial.
As children, Alkebsi, Kaftan and Majors learned English through a technique called cued speech, which helps deaf people accurately read lips by using eight hand signs that signify, depending on their placement around the mouth, different phonetic sounds.
Advocates say cued speech holds enormous potential for tackling the deaf literacy crisis in a nation where almost 40,000 school-age children are in deaf education programs. But the technique is staunchly opposed by many in the mainstream deaf community, who find cued speech offensive.
"It goes back to having a pathological view of deafness," said Mark Rust, coordinator of the deaf education program at McDaniel College in Westminster. "The pathological view of deafness is, 'I need to fix you.' And the easiest way to fix you is to give you English."
American Sign Language is widely considered the language of deaf people in the U.S., and it is recognized as a foreign language in 40 states, including Maryland. It has no grammatical or syntactical relationship to spoken English. By contrast, cued English is not a language but an aid to English comprehension - a system that helps deaf people read lips with precision. Unlike American Sign Language interpreters, who translate from English to sign language and back, cued speech transliterators use hand signals to make spoken English understood by the deaf.
Viewed as threat
Many in the mainstream deaf community see this as an "English-first" orientation. As a result, cued speech is viewed by some American Sign Language advocates as a threat, said Barbara Raimondo, advocacy director at the American Society of Deaf Children. She traces that perception to the system's history at Gallaudet University, where it was developed in the early 1960s by college administrator R. Orin Cornett to combat poor reading comprehension among students at the nation's only university for the deaf.
"When cueing was invented at Gallaudet, it was invented for the purpose of teaching deaf people English reading and writing," Raimondo said. "But what happened is, it got taken over by people who said, 'Let's use it for speaking and spoken language.' So I think it has been used to exclude sign language."
That was a particularly sensitive issue in the 1960s, when many in the deaf community embraced American Sign Language as their natural language.
While signing flourished, cued speech languished as politically incorrect. Today, the cued speech community constitutes a tiny fraction of deaf Americans. In 2005, fewer than 200 of 37,500 deaf and hard-of-hearing students in elementary and secondary schools nationwide used the technique as their primary mode of communication with teachers, a survey by the Gallaudet Research Institute found.
Among all ages, no more than several thousand deaf Americans use cued speech, according to an official with the National Cued Speech Association, which recently held a conference at Towson University to celebrate the technique's 40-year anniversary.
But the technique did find a minor foothold in deaf education in the late 1970s, when some public school systems - notably Montgomery County - employed cueing in the classroom, in addition to sign language, as early as pre-school.
As they enter mainstream colleges and universities, the early generations of deaf students educated with cued speech have become ambassadors for the technique, but they have also encountered logistical and ideological hurdles.
Hilary Franklin was one of three deaf cueing students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the mid-1990s. The university often couldn't find cued speech transliterators. When they were available, the transliterators were usually "lousy," she said.
Franklin's experience is common, according to Jean Krause, a professor of communication science and disorders at the University of South Florida, and a cueing advocate. "The problem of finding qualified and/or certified transliterators is enormous," Krause said in an e-mail.
There are only about 100 certified cued speech transliterators in the U.S., according to the agency that handles certification. Krause said there is an immediate need for at least 100 more.
A transliterator silently mouths a speaker's words while simultaneously using hand signals to represent each uttered phoneme, one of the 43 vowel-consonant combinations that are the smallest part of English speech.
The shape of the transliterator's hand represents a consonant sound, while the position indicates a vowel.
"Cueing represents every single thing that's being said [except], importantly, things that are confusing to someone who is lip reading, because many words look alike on the lips," said Sarina Roffe, president of the National Cued Speech Association.
"Let's say I'm in a biology classroom. There's a big difference between the words 'psychology,' 'psychologist' and 'psychological,'" said Roffe, "but they're very confusing to the lip reader because they're identical at the beginning and you can easily make mistakes."
Though she has become adept at reading lips without the signs, Alkebsi needs a transliterator in her UMBC classes because "the professor moves around the room while [he] is talking, or writes on the board with [his] back turned," she said.
Finding a qualified transliterator was a constant struggle for Franklin, who graduated from Chapel Hill in 2003. "Many transliterators work for the public school systems, so they're not readily available at colleges that typically only have one or two deaf cueing students and therefore can't guarantee a full-time job to transliterators," she said.
Not in mainstream
Cued speech transliteration is not a regular component of any mainstream deaf teacher-education program, Krause said, though Gallaudet and Columbia University offer elective courses in the subject.
Lisa Houck, director of curriculum and instruction at the Maryland School for the Deaf, said cued speech is not used there and is not under consideration.
It's also not in use at McDaniel College, which has one of the largest graduate programs in deaf education in the country.
"Our philosophy is, we feel American Sign Language should be the language of instruction," said Rust. "And by developing a strong foundation in ASL, you can lead students to develop English literacy skills."
College students who cue might encounter resistance from campus disability offices.
"I am so much against [cued speech], and so are the deaf," said Marla Holt, coordinator of deaf services at the University of Baltimore. "Their natural language is American Sign Language."
Holt, who is also a sign language interpreter, said that in her 15 years at the university, no deaf student has asked for a cued speech transliterator. She would provide one if asked, she said, but only reluctantly: "I would not be real thrilled about it, but that is their right. Luckily, I have never been asked that."
Such attitudes are common, said Jeff Majors. "I've met plenty of resistance from deaf people, teachers and interpreters," he said in an e-mail interview. "It takes time to convince them that using cued speech is a genuine benefit for the deaf."
Majors, whose parents fought to introduce the technique at a school for the deaf in Houston when he was 8 and unable to read or write, is certain he would be illiterate today without it.
"The truth is, my signing friends from my school ... none of them made it," he said. "Most dropped out. Most have jobs they don't want. ... Their English is terrible."
Cueing students who were interviewed expressed amusement that eight hand signs could be viewed as a threat to American Sign Language, which they all use and praise as rich and expressive.
"It's ridiculous, actually, to think that cueing could ever eradicate ASL and its accompanying culture," said Allison Kaftan, the English doctoral student, whose 4-year-old daughter also is deaf.
"But the frank and honest truth is that cueing is extremely successful in conveying English effortlessly to deaf people," said Kaftan, who cues with her daughter. "Since we all hold proficiency in English as the gold standard of literacy, cueing is here to stay."
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