Ten Deaf Children, One Powerful Message

Watch video sends powerful message about equal rights "10 Deaf Children, 1 Powerful Message" has become an internet hit.

Sheena McFeely also known as ASL Nook channel share a powerful message on YouTube -- Every day, Deaf people "fail" the hearing test immediately after being born, face "language delays" with their hearing family that don’t learn their natural language, and attempt "perfect speech" in order to fit into the Hearing world. They fight to use interpreters that benefit both the hearing and the Deaf, and deal with job discrimination -- all simply because they cannot hear.

Ironically, the practice of teaching signs to hearing babies is booming due to practical, emotional, and cognitive benefits validated by research. Hundreds of thousands of hearing people are taking American Sign Language (ASL) classes in high school as well as college -- making ASL the third most-studied language, according to Modern Language Association. Many come out of the experience proclaiming how beautiful ASL is.

Even while ASL is beautified, Deafness is still perceived as something that needs to be fixed. This makes Deaf people seem unequal, abnormal, and even defective. Deaf people are perplexed by this, as they see themselves as equal, diverse, and an attribute to this world.

"TODAY WE ASK, WHEN CAN YOU SEE US THE SAME WAY DEAF SEE THEMSELVES?"

It is our hope that this message will raise awareness, and at the same time, encourage Americans to join the Deaf community in the ongoing fight for equality.

SOURCE

Follow @ASLNook:
Blog - https://aslnook.com
Facebook - https://facebook.com/aslnook
Twitter - https://twitter.com/aslnook
YouTube - https://youtube.com/channel/aslnook

Related #ASLNook:
ASL Nook - McFeely Family's Introduction
The Internet Opens A Window To The Deaf World

Related:
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Educate For Hearing Parents With Deaf Children/Toddlers
ASLized: Through the Hands
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Educate For Hearing Parents With Deaf Childrens/Toddlers
Importance of Educating Hearing Parents
Interview With Hearing Parents Of A Deaf Son
ASL Rose: Two Deaf Babies

Related Hearing Parents With Deaf Children:
Interview With Hearing Parents Of A Deaf Son
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Early Language Acquisition of Deaf Babies
Deaf Awareness: One Deaf Child
American Sign Language For Babies & Toddlers
Cochlear Implants Is NOT A Cure !
Why Is It Important To Learn Sign At Birth For Deaf Child ?
Educating Hearing People About The Deaf World

VICE News: Deaf Culture 'Signs of Change'

Deaf Culture: VICE News Tonight on HBO - Full Segment.

VICE: Today, more than 40 percent of American children born Deaf receive cochlear implants. The technology effectively restores hearing by bypassing the ear and delivering audio information directly to the brain. The vast majority of Deaf children who are implanted develop hearing and speaking skills comparable to their hearing peers, thus allowing them the option to “mainstream” into normal schools in the United States.

To activate this feature, press the "CC" button.

Deaf education in the U.S. has gone through many phases. American Sign Language (ASL) is currently the dominant mode of instruction in Deaf schools, but there have been periods where ASL was banned and students were forced to speak and lip-read, an ineffective approach known as Oralism. ASL has now gained legitimacy and been shown to include the deep grammar and syntax found in spoken languages. It is also the wellspring of Deaf Culture, a proud community wary of historical attempts to assimilate them into a hearing world.

As more parents opt for cochlear implants, VICE News explores their impact on the medical condition that gave rise to a cultural identity.

Read: "Prisons basically ignore the Americans With Disabilities Act, leaving a third of inmates facing abuse and neglect" - http://bit.ly/2jwqCX4

Subscribe to VICE News here: http://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-VICE-News

Check out VICE News for more: http://vicenews.com

Follow @VICENews:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/vicenews
Twitter - https://twitter.com/vicenews
Tumblr - http://vicenews.tumblr.com/
Instagram - http://instagram.com/vicenews
More videos from the VICE network - https://www.fb.com/vicevideo

Related #VICE:
Why Deaf Americans Fear President Trump
Interview With 'The Tribe' Actress Yana Novikova

Related Mainstreaming School:
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Hearing People Should Sign For Themselves

WATCH: A psychologist is calling for signing to be available as a ‘foreign language’ option for hearing children.

LONDON, UK -- Dr Jim Cromwell said that learning British Sign Language (BSL) would benefit all students’ education and make life easier for Deaf people, bringing ‘extraordinary’ benefits for those without hearing.

In an ‘ideal world’ BSL would form part of the National Curriculum and be a compulsory element in mainstream schools, he added.

“Bilingualism gives a huge advantage in terms of thinking skills,” said Dr Cromwell, a clinical psychologist at Exeter Deaf Academy.

Having a wider population of people with BSL would make life easier those without hearing, he said. More than 900,000 people in the UK are severely or profoundly Deaf, according to the charity, Action on Hearing Loss.

Dr Cromwell also believes that those of the country’s 45,000 Deaf children who are taught in mainstream schools are not receiving the education they deserve.

“There is not the right support for them,” he said.

“They are being helped by teaching assistants with Level 2 BSL – that’s less than an O Level.

“Schools are getting away with that. There is the attitude of ‘they (Deaf children) are not doing well, but they are disabled, aren’t they?’

“Relying on education through spoken (rather than signed) lessons is like trying to learn maths A Level in Russian. Lip reading is 40 per cent guess work.”

Dr Cromwell, who has BSL at Level 4 – equivalent to degree standard – is believed to be the only clinical psychologist on the staff of a UK specialist school.

While a Deaf child ‘can do everything except hear’ many came to the Exeter school with attachment disorder, language delay, and behavioural problems because of a lack of access to BSL.

“They fall behind in primary school and are regarded as ‘problem students’,” he said. “Not all of our students are like that by any means, but we get those.”

Linguistic deprivation was one of the consequences of deafness that often began in the home as 90 per cent of children who were born Deaf had Hearing parents.

“Some (parents) will have never met a Deaf person, have no BSL and struggle to know what to do,” he said.

Their children were then learning BSL from a parent who was also learning the signing language. That might lead to learning deals that could give rise to behavioural problems, said Dr Cromwell.

Further problems might arise at schools without teachers qualified in BSL at a high level.

Part of the problem was that BSL was seen by many as a ‘pidgin’ form of English, instead of a language that was ‘heir to a rich cultural landscape’.

Widespread learning and use of BSL would help address many of those problems leading to an extraordinary increase in the well-being of Deaf children, said Dr Cromwell.

SOURCE

Deaf People May Have Trouble Reading

A new reason for why the Deaf may have trouble reading, health report.

Deaf people may have no trouble communicating words through American Sign Language, or ASL. But studies of ASL users show that the average Deaf adult reads at the level of a nine-year-old. The explanation has always been that this is because they never learned to connect letters with sounds.

But a recent study shows that Deaf readers are just like other people learning to read in a second language.

Linguist Jill Morford led the study. She says: "The assumption has always been that the problems with reading were educational issues with what's the right way to teach reading when you can't associate sounds with letters. But what we're finding is that all this time we've been ignoring the fact that they're actually learning a new language." Ms. Morford is a professor at the University of New Mexico and part of a research center at Gallaudet University in Washington.

Most students at Gallaudet are Deaf; the center studies how Deaf people learn and use language. Professor Morford says signers are like English learners whose first language uses a different alphabet. She says: "Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that's very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography. "The orthography is the written system and spelling of a language. Of course, with signers, their first language has no written system at all, just hand gestures.

Gallaudet professor Thomas Allen explains what effect this has on reading. He says: "There's a silent hearing going on ... when a hearing person reads a word. When a deaf person reads a word, there's not. They see the word and there's some kind of an orthographic representation.

And some of the research in our center has shown that when Deaf readers read an English word, it activates their sign representations of those words." Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words "paper" and "movie." Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are. To make the sign for paper," he says, "you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper." Movie is very similar, except the other hand "lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen."

The study appears in the journal Cognition. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villareal. VOA Special English Health Report: https://voaspecialenglish.com.

Deaf People Are Cheated By Oralism

Deaf people are cheated by oralism in American Sign Language.

Support bi-lingual education for Deaf children. Stop Indiana HB 1367.

Please share this video clip from the 1994 PBS documentary 'For A Deaf Son'.

This documentary is no longer available to view or purchase anywhere. I wish it would become available to view publicly. So many good things in this film. Jack Gannon's words are inspiring, touching and timeless.

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Life and Deaf - BBC4 Documentary
Through Deaf Eyes - Documentary Film
Living In Between The Deaf And Hearing Worlds
Deaf Awareness 'Voiceless' Short Film
VICE News: Deaf Culture 'Signs of Change'
Can Deaf People Hear Their Own Thoughts ?
Deaf Documentary Film: 9/11 Fear In Silence
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Related Posts: #DeafAwareness - #DocumentaryFilm - #ShortFilm

Oralism Is A 'Jealous Mistress'

Oralism is a 'Jealous Mistress' in American Sign Language.

Indiana Legislature House Bill 1367 represents a new attack on Deaf education in that state. In this vlog, I analyze the bill and its potential impacts and flaws.

References: Summary and text of Indiana House Bill 1367: https://www.in.gov/apps/lsa/session/billwatch

"If Bilingual Education for the Deaf is so great, why are the school test scores so low?": https://www.youtube.com

Dr. Don Grushkin's site: https://wn.com/drdongcsus

Why American Sign Language?

This video discusses why we should provide a Deaf baby American Sign Language as early as possible.

References:
*Mayberry, Rachel (1998) The critical period for language acquisition and the Deaf child's language comprehension: A psycholinguistic approach. Bulletin d'Audiophonologie: Annales Scientifiques de L'Université de Franche-Comté, 15.

*Woolfe, Tyron/Herman, Rosalind/Roy, Penny/Woll, Bencie (2010), Early Lexical Development in Native Signers: A BSL Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI. In: Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 51, 322--331.

*Pichler, Debbie C. LIN 510: Introduction to first and second language acquisition. Gallaudet University, Washington D.C.. Sep. 2011. Lectures.

Related Posts: #AmericanSignLanguage - #ASLFacts

Why The Deaf May Have Trouble Reading

A new reason for why the Deaf may have trouble reading, health report.

Deaf people may have no trouble communicating words through American Sign Language, or ASL. But studies of ASL users show that the average Deaf adult reads at the level of a nine-year-old.

The explanation has always been that this is because they never learned to connect letters with sounds. But a recent study shows that Deaf readers are just like other people learning to read in a second language.

Linguist Jill Morford led the study. She says: "The assumption has always been that the problems with reading were educational issues with what's the right way to teach reading when you can't associate sounds with letters. But what we're finding is that all this time we've been ignoring the fact that they're actually learning a new language." Ms. Morford is a professor at the University of New Mexico and part of a research center at Gallaudet University in Washington.

Most students at Gallaudet are Deaf; the center studies how Deaf people learn and use language. Professor Morford says signers are like English learners whose first language uses a different alphabet. She says: "Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that's very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography. "The orthography is the written system and spelling of a language. Of course, with signers, their first language has no written system at all, just hand gestures.

Gallaudet professor Thomas Allen explains what effect this has on reading. He says: "There's a silent hearing going on ... when a hearing person reads a word. When a deaf person reads a word, there's not. They see the word and there's some kind of an orthographic representation.

And some of the research in our center has shown that when Deaf readers read an English word, it activates their sign representations of those words." Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words "paper" and "movie." Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are. To make the sign for paper," he says, "you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper." Movie is very similar, except the other hand "lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen."

The study appears in the journal Cognition. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villareal. This is the VOA Special English Health Report, from https://voaspecialenglish.com.

Gallaudet University - What Is Bilingualism

Documentary Film - What Is Bilingualism? - ASL Version.

The original video recordings from students taking Barbara Kannapel's "Bilingualism in the Deaf Community" course at Gallaudet University, Spring 1992. Revised, 2011 (remixed using Final Cut).

Gallaudet University is the world leader in liberal education and career development for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing undergraduate students.

The University enjoys an international reputation for the outstanding graduate programs it provides Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing, and Hearing students, as well as for the quality of the research it conducts on the history, language, culture, and other topics related to Deaf people.

Gallaudet University Website: https://gallaudet.edu.
Gallaudet University Vlogs: https://youtube.com/gallaudetvideo.