Claire Sloan: The importance of using sign language with deaf children

I couldn’t agree more with you Claire. I was born deaf but parents didn’t realise I was deaf until my brother who came along 14 months later started talking and I wasn’t talking at all. I used my eyes, was very active and felt vibrations so it was harder for my inexperienced parents to detect my deafness. They took me to the doctors who said I was lazy and backwards; I got referred to a paediatrician when I was just 3 who told me to sit on my chair. He was apparently terrifying to look at. He picked me up and plonked me hard on my chair and held his pocket watch to my ear on the side nearest to my mother. Naturally I looked at my mother puzzled. He announced “See she can hear! She’s mentally retarded!” This man retired a week later. My mother was furious and upset as she was sure I was deaf and knew I wasn’t retarded.

Finally shortly before I was four I was diagnosed as probably deaf by the headmaster of the then Royal School for the Deaf and Dumb at Margate. He invited me to join his school for a term to see how I got on. I learnt to read, started writing and could count up to 20 by the end of the first term. I also started learning to talk. I turned 4 within a couple of days of starting school. However not learning language early on in any form meant that I’ve suffered as a consequence. My parents and family never tried to learn or use BSL with me either though my father and grandfather did know the BSL alphabet. I didn’t know my father knew the alphabet until recently! I do remember my grandfather once using the BSL alphabet when I was 6 to explain the difference between two names but that was the only time he ever used it. My father told me about 10 yrs ago that I shocked him to the core at the age of four tugging his hand signing to him “Look, aeroplane” He didn’t know how to cope or react.

My brain takes longer to process things and sometimes my spoken language comes out in the wrong order and I sound like I’m talking rubbish! Not learning language early on and my family not using sign language I feel definitely delayed my prelingual communication. I had to use a lot of my early schooling years learning to speak and use language which meant a lot of catching up. I then moved from a school for the deaf to a partially hearing unit where I was forced to integrate with hearing children and was totally lost. It was a very lonely time until I was 11 nearly 12 when I finally went back to a school for the deaf but it only permitted oral speech on the basis that we’d have to be oral to integrate with society. I was ok in that I could read earlier than some of the children and could write but maths was delayed as I didn’t have the concept of language to understand maths for some time. I could also tell the time beautifully by the age of 6 as my father made sure I could so I was streets ahead in that way but all this still meant I was behind mentally in the usage of language. I was in a class a year older than myself for 4 yrs in a hearing environment but was often confused and never integrated with the hearing children and only attached myself to one child at one of the 3 hearing schools I attended.

Fortunately with hard work on both teachers, parents and my behalf I’ve caught up in many ways but feel on the mental front of understanding stuff quickly I’m still slower. I’m fully aware of this as my deaf friends who were detected as being deaf and got taught a lot earlier than me are way more quick in picking up concepts. I have succeeded in going to university and indeed trained to teach children from 3 to 13 so clearly am not stupid or mentally retarded. I’m lucky I know in that I was taught well. Now I’m re learning BSL that I learnt when I was 4 to 6 before I was forced to be oral as no one knew BSL in the next schools I attended. Now that’s fun and what’s more I feel I’m allowed to be deaf and more importantly be normal with both deaf and hearing peers in my BSL class!

Thanks Claire for your wonderful posting.

Madeline, that’s a very kind response. Apologies for the long response to your questions but it actually brings to mind a number of things.

Firstly we have to remember the Warner Report has a lot to account for these attitudes being changed in the 60’s 70’s and early 80’s before some people emerged in my eyes as ‘wronged’ by the then new attitude for exampe that the deaf must become solely oral only. Hence the move away from having specialist schools to meet the needs of those with specific disabilities and making children become integrated in schools that were ill equipped to deal with those of disabilities.

It was only later on it was learned from the popularity of baby signing to hearing babies that showed how vital early communications was so that babies didn’t have to suffer frustration from being unable to communicate orally and how they then progressed faster later on than those babies who didn’t have the fortunate experience of being able to sign. How was it that it was ok for hearing babies to learn to sign and yet the deaf babies and young deaf children were NOT permitted to sign as it was bad as they have to learn to speak? That’s when there was a wake up call in some respects I feel or a light bulb moment that perhaps sign language wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

There were other fangled teaching methods such as ‘cued speech’ where some signs were used to indicate speech sounds which from what I heard wasn’t wholly successful and at the end of the day was only designed to forced the deaf to use oral speech only. It was a method attempted even recently on a deaf child who is 11 yrs old now and she didn’t cope well with it.

The biggest problem I feel is the hearing world viewing deaf people who use sign language as being visually ‘abnormal’ as it’s a very expressive language with flying moving hands and strong facial expressions. If one isn’t exposed to it from an early age onwards it may be does look different but seriously let’s look at the Italians for example – they are most expressive in their language and deaf people like me have been able to understand quite a bit of what they are saying despite not understanding Italian speech! Let me explain this further.

In my early 20’s I used to work in an antique market at Portabello Road, London where it was very international in the volume of people who used the market. I was faced constantly with foreigners asking questions often in their own language like how much and how old etc… I used to communicate with them with ease despite not knowing their language. My then boyfriend of the time was puzzled how I could cope and he couldn’t and he was hearing. I didn’t know why or how other than I just did.

Later on some years ago my hearing sister asked me to go on holiday with her for 4 days so we could have some quality time together. She chose Italy as she’d been studying the language intensively for 6 months whilst I map read and we had a marvellous time. In those few days I picked up what the Italians were saying from their body language and at one point we got lost driving and we stopped and got out and asked someone for directions to a town. They in Italian directed me. I then got back in the car and reiterated what was told to me. My sister looked at me in amazement and said “How did you know?” I shrugged my shoulders and said “I just did”. We got to the town we wanted and had a good time. On the last day just hours before we were due to fly we found a really interesting reclamation antiques centre but could only stay a short while. The owner gesticulated to us explaining in full Italian he had to close early and was sorry. He was attending a poetry reading session. My sister didn’t understand. I got it straight away and explained to my sister and the owner got excited and happy as he realised I understood and was nodding his head like mad saying yes in Italian.

It hit me straight away then that what had happened was that being deaf had enabled me to fine tune my ability to read body language. My sister was gutted that after 6 months of studying Italian so intensively didn’t enable her to understand so instinctively what I could do! It was very funny to me in a way to discover that I had an unknown talent! Since then I’ve learned that the deaf all over the world often can break language barriers with other deaf sign language users from other countries despite the differing sign languages and believe this is because the deaf have abilities that the hearing users do not have which is reading and understanding body language acutely.

It doesn’t stop here either. Recently I took on a part time job for a short while working with a young deaf autistic person at college who couldn’t speak and could only communicate one or two signs back to people. I had only just started learning BSL, (British Sign Language for those not familiar), and other staff working with this young person all had good knowledge of it and were mostly hearing users themselves. I quickly grasped her body language and was able to write a short manual explaining her facial expressions and various body language signs to enable staff to interpret how this person was feeling and what she needed or wanted. I did this manual in my own spare time as I was realising that people were not understanding this deaf autistic person which was creating huge problems for this young adult. They were for example misinterpreting her ‘tiredness’ signs and getting her to rest in bed at midday and wondering why she wouldn’t settle and sleep! I checked this work I did with the person’s parent and they were astonished and thrilled and said it usually takes years for people to understand their child and yet I had grasped it within two weeks. Interestingly enough the agency who took me on to work with this person are very knowledgeable of deaf people like me in our ability to read visually and told the college that I would be very useful despite the lack of knowledge of BSL. I was thus able to prove my worth as a deaf person despite not knowing a lot of BSL.

I’m not unusual or special in my ability and those who have a lot to do with the deaf will know how intuitive deaf people appear to be to emotions of others around them for example. We deaf people have a huge amount to offer to the hearing world if only the hearing people would join our world as well as we participate in their world. Learning sign language early on at school would be a very small step but huge in the eyes of the deaf in that it then would normalise the deaf in the hearing world. You only have to look at a small town in USA where there’s a vast number of deaf people born due to genetics to see how the hearing have adapted and learnt ASL, (American sign language) so the deaf are equally respected and fully integrated in the hearing/deaf world. The deaf are ‘normal’ there and it’s no big deal if one is deaf. That’s how all people with any kind of disability should be treated world wide so that they are respected for their differences and able to feel fully part of the community despite their disabilities.