How do Deaf children learn to read?
- Xis Sign
- Oct 21, 2021
- 1 min read
Hearing children learn to read by listening to our teachers and parents speaking the words out loud.
Since then, we would link the sound of the words to the the "thing" that is written on the paper.
Every time we recognize the exact word, we have the tendency of reading it out loud inside our head.
The process of learning how to read involved many senses:
Observing the mouth, or lipreading
Listening to the sound
Looking at the word on paper
Memorize
By using as many senses as possible, hearing people experience an easier learning progress than Deaf children.
Deaf children learn to read by observing. Look at this example below:
Instead of sounds, Deaf children link the symbols with signs.
For children who were born deaf, they imagine using sign language inside their head when reading--just like how we read the word out loud using our inner voice.
This way of learning is not the most effective method, because the sign languages' vocabulary is very limited.
There are many words that do not exist in the sign language dictionaries, like how you wouldn't be able to find the exact word when translating a Vietnamese vocabulary to English language.
For children who suffer from hard-of-hearing conditions, they are not totally deaf.
In fact, many of them use oral communication as the main communication tool.
So, they would learn to read using the lipreading method and in most cases, their learning method is the same as hearing children's.
We recommend you watch this video made by James R. Booth:
References:
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