By Amy Voorhees, Teacher of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Co-President of the Cued Speech Association of Minnesota
There are several ways to implement cueing into a child’s education. The easiest and most effective way to do this is to first cue at home. By cueing at home, your child learns the language of your home (assuming it’s a spoken language), as well as your culture and values. You also help your child feel like part of the family, sharing the same native language as you.
Cued Speech is a finite system to learn. Once you learn the 8 hand shapes, 4 vowel placements and how to put them together to form words, you can cue anything and everything you say to your child, after only a 15-hour class. You may choose to take more classes to improve your skills, but, you would not have to. After about 6 months of practice, you should be able to cue at your rate of speech.
90% of information children learn is learned incidentally. These are the things that we just know, but no one ever sat down and taught us. At IEP meetings when teachers talk about background knowledge or general knowledge, these are the types of things they are talking about. When you cue at home, your children pick up these things naturally, learning them the same way hearing kids do.
Research says children who have a hearing loss, but no other cognitive or developmental delays, will have language skills equal to their hearing peers when they reach double the age at which they were first consistently cued to at home. So, if you start when your child is age two, by age four your child will have language skills equal to a hearing four-year-old’s. It pays to start young!
Cueing at home also has an impact on what communication method will be used in school. A child who enters school with English as their native language through cueing, should also get cueing in school. If your school challenges that, you can request that testing be administered in more than one mode, and then compare scores.
A test can be given in Cued English and another version of the test given in Spoken English. A child that is cued to at home will typically do better on the Cued English version. A student who is cued to at home will also typically have a better grasp of phonemic awareness (how letters sound), which is the best predictor of how well children will learn to read in their first years in school.
If your child is older and you want to add cueing to their educational plan, I would still encourage you to learn to cue and use it at home. When I work with older students new to cueing I use the “sandwich” technique—sign the word, then cue it and then sign it again. As the child gets more comfortable with cueing, I reverse the sandwich, cueing the word, signing it for clarification and then cueing it again. I add cueing slowly to their school day, starting with subjects like spelling and grammar. I also try to implement cueing during speech therapy sessions.
Often I incorporate cueing quickly into subjects like science and social studies, where there are immense amounts of vocabulary words that often do not have signs. If a student is younger than 8, typically they pick up cueing with out any formal training in how the system works. After that age, kids need to be taught the system and how it works.
If you are cueing with your child, it is important to get cueing going at school as soon as possible in order to maintain consistency between home and school. Although some professionals would disagree with me, I am a strong proponent of having transliterators in the preschool settings, if the teacher does not cue. It is amazing how early students learn to focus on the person cueing. If you are cueing at home and you want your child to get cueing at school, it is important to express this desire to your school district as early as possible. Unfortunately, transliterators are hard to find, and often districts need to train someone for this position. It takes at least 9 months of cueing before a person is able to cue at the rate of a teacher’s speech in the classroom. There are other skills such as ethics, that a transliterator needs to master before he or she should be in the classroom.
Language Matters, Inc., teaches these skills through a series of classes, which are offered in Minnesota through the Resource Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Faribault. Unfortunately, these classes must be taken in order and if you miss one, you have to wait for it to be offered again before continuing. The first class in this series is called “Educational Interpreting Defined.” I would strongly suggest parents attend this class. I would also suggest that you request a member of your IEP team to attend this class as well as an administrator in your special education department. This is the only class in the series that participants need not be able to cue to attend.
For information on the Language Matters classes
offered in Minnesota, call the Resource Center at 1-800-
657-3936, or visit
www.langauge-matters.com.
For more information on Cued Speech, contact the
Cued Speech Association of Minnesota at 952-929-3965.
