Yes we are planning on amplification asap so he can get as much English language as possible and we also want to sign with him but my wonder is, how do we as his family learn asl in order for hIm to learn ? Right now I can't expose him to more than a few basic signs I've looked up online. it is not as if i can communicate any sentences or complete thoughts. How do deaf/hoh kids learn asl? How do the parents? I'd love for him to be bilingual.
so many urge and encourage immediate asl but i can't do it if i don't know it. Will he just learn it through his experiences with early intervention?
Thanks to all who are replying, from all angles.
I can tell you how we achieved this -- given that I hadn't previously been exposed to ASL, either. I'd been told by language experts that if we chose to use ASL as our child's means of communication, we'd need to immerse her in the language, among fluent users. Just as you would naturally surround a hearing child with fluent spoken language, songs, chatter, constant use. Our DHH clinic, both the audis and ENTs, at Children's Hospital Boston advised immediate and comprehensive exposure to ASL and pointed us to the parent infant program at a school for the deaf an hour and a half from home as we began hearing aid trials.
If you aren't fluent yourself, it's a challenge. We weren't, and overcame that obstacle by requesting an ASL-fluent SLP for our 3X weekly early intervention program, participating in 2X weekly group play sessions at a school for the deaf with ASL-using facilitators, volunteers, and deaf/hoh peers, and weekly parent groups while the children were exposed to ASL stories, and enrolling her in an ASL daycare run by the school for 6 hours a day 4X week. On Saturdays we had family sign instruction for the whole family in our home, provided by the state DHH commission. My husband and I each took ASL classes offered by the school for the deaf on different nights to stay ahead of our little one. Once she turned 3, my daughter was enrolled in the fill-time preK program, and that's where her language really took off. We've augmented her daily use of ASL in class (it's a bi-bi school where ASL is the primary language of instruction and interaction) with pull out ASL language sessions, like speech therapy, but for ASL. Her school has a voices-off policy in general, so she's immersed in ASL the majority of the day, although she's with a group of kids who have CIs and have really good auditory access, so they are permitted to use spoken language along with sign during their morning sessions.
She's fluent in ASL and her spoken language abilities are on or surpassing age level in general when measured against typical hearing children, although she's scoring significantly lower on English vocab than hearing kids her age, which her teachers think is because she's not exposed to good peer language models, which we'll begin addressing soon. It can be tough to achieve a true balance when you are raising a child to be bimodally bilingual. We've never engaged in AVT or other traditional speech therapies, her English language has developed incidentally through casual use at home, while ASL has been the focus of her academic environment and intensive directed learning.
