I have written about this a couple of times now, and have posted it in my journal. My fascination is with people who have hearing impairments, especially children. I have always been interested in deafness and people who sign, and as I wrote earlier, that was one of the reasons I decided to stick with SLP. I remember asking the question in 325, how children who are born deaf eventually learn language and learn to write and spell. No one knew much about that, or at least had no definitive answer for me. For two years now, that question has escaped me and I still think about it.
How can deaf children learn to spell when they’ve never heard words before? How can they “sound it out” when they have no sounds? At the same time I think about these questions, I develop a deep appreciation and respect for their teachers, who probably spend countless hours and much patience, teaching these children how to communicate most effectively in a world that transmits most information verbally; not with sign.
So I guess my essential question would be, “How do you teach a child who has never heard before how to spell, read, and write?”