That is a question I ask myself everyday! I am a teacher for deaf students and I ask myself "How the hell did I learn how to read without knowing ASL??" I am profoundly deaf and I have been asking my mom how??? How did I aquire a strong language foundation through oral education with my degree of deafness especially reading and writing? I consider myself lucky that I love to read cuz it definitely did help with my writing skills.
I guess I must have learned it thru the phonetic way by lipreading cuz I remember my teacher pointing the letters and then pointing to her lips to form the sounds
. What about the letters that look the same on the lips such as the b's and p's????
Anyways, I am teaching my kids to get into the habit of reading and trying to make it fun. They are showing some motivation about reading and I plan to keep it up.
The problem is many of my students have hearing parents who do not know sign language and I emphasize to the parents to label their homes with words cuz the students dont have access to language at home and as a result, their language development is seriously impacted. How do u teach them to figure out all the grammatical rules of English when their L1 language is weak in the first place? And parents blame us teachers for their poor reading skills? Get real! It is mostly due to not having a full acess to lanugauge during the critical years from birth to 5 years. I will never give up on my students but it takes motivation on their part to be willing to tackle on the complexity of the English language.
Yesterday, I gave a spelling test to my students and one of my students couldnt remember a word and as he was sitting there trying to make a mental image of the word, I was thinking "Lucky them hearing kids can rely on decoding to figure out the correct spelling of the words. while my students have to use their memory"
I remember as I child, those spelling tests were a nightmare to me cuz I relied on lipreading so when the teacher would say each word, I always waited for her to use the word in a sentence to identify the word cuz my school used a lot of word families for spelling and when they would say words like "bat" and "pat" I would be totally lost so I relied on them using them in sentences to know which word is being used. GEEZ!
Why do u think I oppose to oral education only for deaf children? I think sign language should be the primary language used and spoken language used as a tool. Like someone else said, give the deaf child the full toolbox!