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A New Reason for Why the Deaf May Have Trouble Reading | Health | Learning English/*
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RSS FeedA New Reason for Why the Deaf May Have Trouble Reading??12 April 2011
Photo: APEaster Faafiti uses sign language to communicate with a teammate during practice by the women's basketball team at Gallaudet University in January Share ThisDiggYahoo! BuzzFacebookdel.icio.usStumbleUponRelated ArticlesAre People Who Speak More Than One Language Smarter?Inside the Complex Worlds of Deafness and Deaf Culture in AmericaTO DOWNLOAD the MP3 of this story, click on the MP3 link in the upper right corner of the page. Double-click any word to find the definition in the Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary
This is the VOA Special English Health Report.
Deaf people may have no trouble communicating English words through American Sign Language, or ASL. But studies of ASL users show that, on average, educated deaf adults are likely to read 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.
JILL MORFORD: “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.
JILL MORFORD: “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? Tom Allen explains what effect this has on reading.
TOM ALLEN: “We're not dealing with representations in the brain which are primarily auditory. You know, people when they read, they kind of hear -- there’s a silent hearing going on when you read a word, 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.
TOM ALLEN: “The sign for paper, 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. Now, movie is, like, very similar. One of the hands keeps a flat hand shape and it just kind of lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen.”
The study is in the journal Cognition.
And that's the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Kelly Nuxoll. To learn about other research on bilingualism, go to voaspecialenglish.com. And you can find captioned videos of our reports on the VOA Learning English channel on YouTube.? I'm Steve Ember.
Listen? Email? Print? Comments?Comments (22)13-04-2011Winsorthank you, My love goes out to deaf people....
13-04-2011Balance(China)I have never expected there are more than one sign languages in the world, even one kind of gesture for each language. There is no doubt it is easy to learn a sign language based on their first language, and vice versa. I'm wondering, is it possible to develop a common used hand gestures for the deaf all over the world?
13-04-2011Rachel(Guatemala)Great report. I am an ESL teacher and I understand learning a new language like this: your mother tongue acts like a strainer in your brain. Every time you are exposed to a new language, the words have to go through that strainer making it difficult to understand the new meanings. Taking classes and practicing make that holes in the strainer wider each time, until you produce and receive the language almost as your mother tongue. Interesting that deaf people go through the same process.
13-04-2011Mr Trang(Viet Nam)Thanks a lot!
13-04-2011AmyWu(China)I think they have hard heart than me a normal person.I want to help them and at the same time become strong like them.
13-04-2011Soo-Chang(South Korea)It is unfortunate for people to not listen. Nobody expects to get the problem. This is just an unhappy thing. But such a misfortune no longer becomes a barrier in one's life. We have to encourage deaf peopel to be able to experience things they want to do, sharing everything in the world with them.
13-04-2011sam(china)good study may help deaf people
13-04-2011Feng Tao(China)It sounds reasonable.
13-04-2011Bob(Mali)Hi all listeners and readers on VOA ,please can you help me to understandwhat this kind of expressions means: to get +past participle like to get struck or to get started in english. I have a lot of difficulty for understanding it.I hope you will assist me and thank you in advance
13-04-2011drac(China)it's hard to understand why the sign of paper is using one hand to tap another flat held hand which seems hard to believe it represents a paper while movie's seems much more accurate by moving one flat hand back forth, well , i believe for deaf people their brains lack language connection of orthography and anything else like sound etc so that it's harder for them to control the expression than normal person.
13-04-2011Ain Park(South Korea)Deaf people, please be great.Thank you, god.Take all my love for you.-_-
13-04-2011paile(China)That's great !
13-04-2011nouredine(Ageria)the only solution for the deaf persons to see this documentary and training to improve their levels.
13-04-2011Maki(Japan)I had never thought of how difficult those deaf people are in reading written words. For certain, a sign language and a written sentence. Is there anything when I find a deaf person? How can they improve the reading skill?
14-04-2011stupid(usa)im happy
14-04-2011Joruji(Japan)@Bob (Mali): You can ask your questions about English during the English lessons on VOA's Learning English Facebook page. The live lessons starts at 02:00 GMT and 13:00 GMT Monday through Friday.
14-04-2011adbulrasak(somalia)although the sing language is easy to lean but same countries have not any equipment thanks
14-04-2011Noma(Philippines)Sign Language is no doubt a blessing to those who have hearing impairment and I'm hoping that more hearing devices of better quality would be invented, to give them the chance to hear those sounds that they have been deprived of.
14-04-2011Luiz(Brasil)Congratolations about ASL, we have in Brasil LBS. Brasilian Language Signal, and I didn′t know nothing about it, but I studied for 6 months and it′s very intersting language, and I didn′t know that had a lot of differnt signal in the same language...
15-04-2011sun(china)Yeah, it maybe just like learning english as a second language. When i need to remember a word or understand what it actually means, i need to compare it to the chinese meaning but when your vacabulary grown to some extent you may use english to describe english.
15-04-2011Mr Long(Viet Nam)Good way to learn english
15-04-2011It is a usefull way to learn English
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