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6. The bilingual home environment As over 90% of deaf children have two hearing parents who have no previous experience of deafness, family services are often part of sign bilingual provision. In Bristol for instance the Deaf Children at Home Project that aims to give families a positive image of deafness, to create links with Deaf people, and teach basic BSL has been running successfully for about 10 years. Similar programmes are in place in the USA and Scandinavian countries. Evaluation of such programmes reports that parents enjoy meeting Deaf adults, that they feel more positive about having a deaf child and that sign language classes ease communication. These are perfect ingredients for setting up a bilingual home environment. So let us look at how hearing families maintain this bilingual home environment as the deaf child grow older. This section focuses on linguistic issues only. In contrast to the oralist model’s emphasis on hard work in order to establish speech, the bilingual model emphasises natural communication in sign language. Parents are told to learn sign language and the assumption is that everything will follow suit. There are several problems with this. Learning and using sign language – “Sign language is important for family interaction” and “Attitude is more important than fluency” Families enrol in early bilingual intervention programmes where they learn basic sign language. This is perfectly adequate for communication with a baby or toddler but what happens as the child gets older? Communication problems may start once the child starts school as his/her linguistic proficiency usually rapidly increases through being in a signing environment all day. The child can quickly get ahead of the parents. The bilingual model stresses that the child’s main linguistic models are Deaf adults at school. This is fine in theory but the reality is that parents live with the child and need to be able to communicate properly at home. Children are hungry for information. How do you explain why the sun goes up and down every day, why granddad died, or why people in Africa are starving if you do not know the language your child uses? How do you soothe your deaf child when he/she is having a temper tantrum, is upset or worried? You cannot rely on the Deaf teaching assistant at those times. At school children learn history, geography, science, maths etc and parents do not know how to talk about these topics; they are often unable to support their child’s schoolwork at home. Yet there are no special classes for parents to continue learning BSL. They may join adult education classes but they are not adequate. Classes are expensive; they do not always fit families’ busy schedules; parents may have other children and may need to find baby sitters. Parents need special classes. Talking to children requires a specific register and vocabulary that is not taught in adult education classes. Why is sign language considered by bilingual education policy makers to be crucial for the family in the early days and not later? Why is there no support for families on this crucial issue? Sign language versus speech With oralism parents are told to speak and not sign. With bilingualism although they are not told that they must not speak, the assumption is that they will sign all the time. The reality is that parents find learning sign language difficult (see reasons described earlier). With no support they may use speech more often than they would if they could sign better. It is often the case that one parent (usually the mother although not always) is more proficient and this creates an imbalance in the relationship with the child. There are many situations when signing is impractical for hearing parents. What about when you are driving the car and the deaf child wants to talk to you? Deaf children are not always good at tapping gently to get attention, they may shout, they may be having an argument with their hearing sibling who may start complaining and ask you to get involved. This is a stressful situation and I often pull over along the road and end up telling them off. What about the many situations when the family is in contact with hearing people who do not sign? What if the deaf child likes to speak? Hearing siblings Many deaf children have hearing siblings. If the sibling is younger it is assumed that he/she will pick up sign language naturally. This is true to some extent but problems still arise. The age gap between the children may mean that their language levels do not match. If the hearing child is speaking, are parents supposed to reply in speech or sign? Most of the time they will reply in speech and the deaf child will ask for a translation. What if the young hearing child is upset and explains something in speech, are parents supposed to force him/her to sign so that the deaf child can have access to the conversation? What about situations when the children play together and communicate in a mixture of modes? Research on speech bilingualism shows that children should not be forced to use a particular language, yet I often do just that. Shauna often wants to speak to her sister but it is incomprehensible. I want them to understand each other; I also want my hearing daughter to learn sign language. Am I supposed to make Shauna sign? I sometimes ask her not to speak but I am concerned that this may have a detrimental effect on her attitude to speech. What message am I sending her? She enjoys speaking and I should be encouraging her but sometimes it is simply not practical. What if my hearing daughter speaks to Shauna, and I ask her to sign? I am aware that this can be detrimental and may lead to her to refuse to sign or resent her sister for being deaf; I also do not like the pressure that it puts on her. Shauna now sometimes asks Karina to sign and being put on the spot Karina refuses to sign. What am I supposed to do? Similar problems arise if the hearing sibling is older with the added difficulty that he/she needs to learn sign language in a perhaps more formal structured manner. These issues are vastly dismissed as the following story sums up. I once told a Deaf person how confusing it was to have three languages in the home and which language to use with my hearing daughter. The person simply looked at me and said: “Well you should sign all the time!” If only it was so simple… The extended family Members of the extended family do not usually learn to sign well enough to communicate with the deaf child. Some may enroll on Stage 1 classes, many give up. Parents and hearing siblings are often turned into interpreters. This is a difficult position that can lead to resentment that the adults in their own family are not making enough of an effort. What are parents supposed to do? In either case we end up with a situation where there is no real meaningful communication with the deaf child. Parents can agree to interpret but this inevitably restrains interaction. Or they can refuse and insist that the grandparents, uncles and aunts find a way to communicate with the deaf child but this also restrains the conversation. It is quite common that hearing siblings get most of the attention. As the deaf child gets older he/she often ends up having no interest in visiting the family. This is emotionally challenging for the parents. Multilingualism Bilingualism is usually understood as being sign language and the majority language of the country. What happens if the deaf child is growing up in a multilingual family, i.e. one of the parent is Italian or Chinese for instance? There are vague references in the literature to the need to foster deaf children’s multilingual and multicultural backgrounds but there is a lack of advice and structure to support this. How do I teach Italian to Shauna? I do not know how I am supposed to do it. Emotionally this is difficult for parents who have emigrated and naturally wish to transmit their linguistic and cultural heritage to their children. The child’s Deaf identity may seem overwhelming. Bilingual materials There is a shortage of quality children’s materials in sign language. One of the worse has to be books with sign graphics in English order. They mean nothing to a deaf child and are a gross representation of the child’s language. Videos have greatly improved but are too often translations of stories for hearing children to which deaf children may find it difficult to relate. Stories with deaf characters would be more suitable. CD-ROM’s are simply awful! The few that are on the market are aimed at teaching sign language or English but none of them are for deaf children to simply play and enjoy. In contrast to the vast amount of excellent materials for hearing children, deaf children’s access is very poor. There are of course very few deaf children and adults on television although this is improving. Within the last year more television programmes have had BSL interpretation. This format works better if the signer is a Deaf person but most of the time it is a hearing interpreter. In that case the register is not always accessible to children as the interpreters are trained to work with an adult audience. I always urge Shauna to watch if I see sign language on television but it is mainly a news bulletin or See Hear to which she is not really interested. As for other subtitles… Well Teletubbies have them but what good is it to a toddler who cannot read and to a child who can read but is not in the least interested in four puppets jumping around and hugging each other saying “E-oh”!… Subtitles in other programmes are usually too fast and the language is too advanced. So parents have to interpret. They scan the TV guides for programmes that are going to be accessible in contents, and spend hours watching “Animal Hospital” or “Pet Rescue” with their deaf child. On her own Shauna will choose to watch some senseless visual programme, or cartoons despite many of them not making any sense to her. For many deaf children the television set is simply a piece of equipment to watch videos. We have endless arguments with Shauna if we want to watch the news or a programme of interest to adults, and we are seriously considering buying her a TV and video for her own use in her bedroom! Contact with Deaf people In order to become proficient in a language we need to be in contact with users of that language. We need to hear the language (or in the case of sign language see it) in order to improve receptive and productive skills. Contact is also necessary in order to learn the rules of usage of the language i.e. how to interrupt, how not to offend, etc… Your Italian will improve if you go to Italy on holiday and mix with Italian people. Well there is no Deafland… So how much contact do hearing families have with Deaf people? Previous research that I conducted two years ago has showed that this contact is almost non-existent. The parents of signing deaf children in my study only met Deaf adults at the school Christmas performance and at events such as workshops for parents where Deaf people may volunteer to look after the children in the creche. This did not necessarily mean that they talked to them. There was no social contact. Parents did not go to the Deaf club, as they felt unwelcome and uncomfortable there. They had no Deaf friends. They felt dissatisfied with this situation. My husband and I were unlucky to live in an area where there was no support for signing families and when we moved to Derby Shauna started school straight away so we had no pre-school programme. We met a few Deaf people in Hull. We met lots in Derby. They all congratulated us on choosing to raise Shauna with BSL but things never developed any further. We expected them to be interested in Shauna and our family but they were not. We were very keen to forge friendships with some of them but it did not happen. They never returned our invitations, we had some painful experiences and we gradually became very disillusioned and angry. Ironically the only Deaf friends that we have are the few whom we knew in Hull. I accept that Deaf people like anybody else are busy with their lives and that many do not know about deaf children (most have hearing children). I also accept that many Deaf people are wary of hearing people. However I feel that they have a responsibility to deaf children and their families and it is disappointing to see that they seem to feel otherwise. |
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