Some info that may help you

<b>Forum for teachers working with deaf students </b>

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Superhal
Posts: 131
Joined: Sun Feb 20, 2005 10:59 pm

Some info that may help you

Post by Superhal » Sat Dec 31, 2005 7:01 pm

This is just a drive-by post. Hopefully, it may help some teachers out there.

A while ago, I was extremely interested in teaching at a school with the most challenging students, and I interviewed the director of the local deaf school near my house. What he told me was very interesting:

1. The best teachers he had were trained in ESL, as the needs of the deaf students mirror those of immigrants.

2. Deaf students present a unique challenge in that they are not learning a 2nd language, but 4th and 5th language. For children that are born deaf, they usually create their own sign language with their parents until they are 5 years old, as most parents of deaf children are not deaf themselves. Then, when the children come to school, they have to learn sign language, which would be their 2nd language. American sign language has a totally different grammatical structure from English, and the two languages are not compatible with each other. Then, they have to learn English itself, and there are two varieties here: English and the local pidgin dialect. For immigrant deaf children, they have learned their own sign language in their home countries.

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