And IMOH,this debate is SO DUMB. Auditory oral/auditory verbal assumes that dhh kids are so low functioning that they cannot master spoken language abilty without life being an eternal speech therapy session....Even dhh kids who Sign STILL can develop pretty good oral speech abilty.....I've seen tons of kids being able to grow up BILINGAL in both speech and Sign, so they can function both with and without their hearing aids/CIs...
Why the heck should dhh kids be trained to exclusively function with only speech and hearing? Why should they have to say "what?" all the time? That's what oralism is............condeming a dhh kid to having to say "what?" all the time!
WHY? Why is that good? I mean I clearly remember a post by someone who said it is possible to get rid of a deaf accent?!?!?!? Some very rarely gifted kids MAY be able to sound like a hearing person....but again WHY is that a good thing? With all the effort and energy it takes to hear and speak.....EVEN for those with a flair for oral skills, a lot of stuff is being sacrificed......EFFORTLESS CONTENT.............
Even HOH kids cannot speak as well as a hearing person.........Most if not all HOH kids still stay in speech for mechanical issues (ie pitch,volumne,tone, articulation) Very few actually MASTER every aspect of speech....Virtually all of the kids who sign off on speech aren't doing so b/c they've mastered speech,but b/c they've admitted that "this is as far as we can go...It's too difficult to expect a dhh kid to have "like hearing" speech.
I wish you'd stop spouting shite, really. I've lurked AllDeaf for a long time and have just signed up cos I've had enough of you saying all this crap.
Why the fcuk are you putting us oral lot into this box that somehow our lives is always difficult, always saying "what", cannot understand what hearing people are saying or would be 100% better off with sign language. Then when someone contradicts you and say that they have decent speech and listening skills, you say that they were privileged, it was a "perfect storm" of factors etc and thereby putting them down by implying that they wouldn't have decent speech skills if their parents was less well off or some crap like that.
I did not have eternal speech therapy - if anything I was done with speech therapy through my CI clinic at age 15, having been assessed to beyond the test's upper limit for vocab (age 30), and I was done with speech therapy from my school for the deaf at age 13, though I was still forced to do tape recordings of my voice to be assessed. (I lived 4 hours drive down country from the school).
My speech therapy consisted of three one-hour sessions per week from ages 2-10, after my CI, they dropped to one a week once I was able to hear all the quiet s and r sounds. And they aren't what you imagine them to be - being sat down and made to speak out certain words or sounds. No, it was things like going to the toy library and learning how to say the names of toys and practice saying those words when I played with them at home, or making pizzas and reading out recipes and being corrected on the hard words, or later on, reading books/watching movies/keeping up on news and talking about them with my teacher of the deaf when she came to visit. There was one time I remember that Rose came with a sewing kit when I was 11 and helped me sew up my teddy because I was upset it had a hole, and I had to talk about what was in that sewing kit such as needles, cotton, string.
I actually have better speech than a lot of people I know, because I was taught to enunciate and speak clearly, whilst others just slur or talk in that typical Kiwi twang. I do get accused of having a British accent though.
I know about 15 deaf kids my age who are mostly oral with CI, and about ten of us desperately want to go bilateral with our implants to get more and better hearing. One of my best friend from another town managed to get another implant cos she has well-off parents. They ALL speak great. Some of them do sign as well. And they've not sacrificed their ordinary education for speech therapy time at all.
So stop making up shit about us to justify your unfounded positions. Yes, it'd be great if deaf kids were bilingual in both a sign language and an oral language, but sometimes it's just doesn't work out that way. It didn't work for my family or me (I have a huge family). It doesn't work for some of my friends' families. But it does work for others, particularly those who have parents who are deaf and uses SL.
Sorry to be rough with you, but you clearly know nothing of the CI experience for most recipients, or our oral speech abilities.