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Can Deaf children be bilingual?To answer this question we need to spend some time considering the performance of Deaf children in school. There is considerable detail on this in the papers supplied with the course notes and also in the Johnson, Liddell and Erting (1989) paper. You should read these. Deaf children are usually in an immersion situation. They are placed in an environment where people use a language which the child has to learn. Unlike hearing children the child does not have immediate access to the language. Some Deaf children have better experiences in their development because of their parents and their degree of hearing loss. But the immersion is usually in the majority language and so the Deaf child even with good hearing will have difficulties in using the language as a cognitive base. In this way the child will only reach floor 1 with difficulty. We can show this by examining the national results for reading performance in Deaf children and by comparing this to what we know for other countries such as the USA. The results are simple, Deaf children do not usually learn to speak well or to read and write well. This has been known since the time of Binet in 1910 when the same survey was carried out in France. Many Deaf children do not have access to the language of education. By definition the child cannot be bilingual because they cannot master the second language. However, Johnson et al (1989) consider that the Deaf child does not even have access to the first language. Since the child does not see good models of sign but rather mixed models where the sign is distorted, the n the child does not learn to sign either. This is precisely what our studies in Britain have found. Even Deaf children in signing programmes do not achieve satisfactory levels of sign competence. Yet we can see bilingual Deaf adults, here and elsewhere - though these are not so common. It is possible. But under the present circumstances it is difficult to achieve. What we have to do in he next sessions is to find out what is necessary to make the bilingualism work. |
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