Can Sign Language Help Deaf Children Learn English? One of the most important things to learn in a deaf community is to learn language it is in critical condition. Because of some public schools having deaf students, they have to come up with new ways of teaching English to them. High school graduates that are deaf can read and write, but only at a fourth grade level. This is not good and that is why they have to come up with new ways of teaching children who are deaf. Recently, there have been ideas on what is the best way to teach deaf children language. This was based more on strong feelings then science. Psychologist hopes to change that though. They are providing a scientific base to help them debate of rather or not deaf children should be taught English or should just English be taught? To learn English only it provides oral training, this concentrates on lip reading and written English. It also teaches “total communication” training, which uses English and Sign English. Signed English is just English that is translated into signs. ASL though is a different forum of English; it has its own vocabulary and grammatical structure. To learn oral only and total communication training that has over powered the American education of deaf and hearing children. Did you know that more then ninety percent deaf children are born to hearing parents? These parents want their children in an English only program. They think that learning ASL will “impede” learning English and that if they learn English only it will “facilitate” it better.
Research shows that learning ASL doesn’t hurt learning English but seems to enhance it. Signed English provides a base to learn any language. Signed English though is visually cumbersome and takes the speaker twice as long to make a sentence, then it does English or ASL. A child may forget the beginning of a proposition before he or