A nice summary of the problems with speech-only language approaches for deaf kids and how they came to be in the first place. Excerpt:
Basically, parents are often told that they have to choose between speaking or sign language for their children. Since most people in the U.S. don’t sign, many opt for focusing solely on spoken language, enrolling their children into speech therapy and audiological training. About 80% of children born deaf in the developed world will get a cochlear implant later on, but the problem is that their brains may not be equipped to understand the complex notion of language by the time that happens.
“Cochlear implants create an electronic symbol, not the ability to hear,” Hall said. “So they miss that first year of life and exposure to language anyway, and [when they get a cochlear implant], kids don’t have any language foundation to help them decode these electronic signals.”
How can a child learn the ABCs in kindergarten if, by age 5, they’ve never really been conceptually introduced to the idea of words and their meaning? Language deprivation has reverberating effects on relationships, education, independence — plus critical skills like memory organization, literacy and mathematics. As one 2012 paper put it, “the brain of a newborn is designed for early acquisition of language.”
“I’ve worked with many students who are language-deprived. Often, they show up to school with only two or three words in their vocabulary,” April Bottoms, a graduate student at Boston University’s Education of the Deaf program, said through an interpreter. “Can they learn how to write, read and get the foundations of education? No. I have to connect with them through shared gazing.” […]
The logical solution appears to be teaching children sign language, even in tandem with more popular, speech-based methods. But somehow, teaching ASL to every deaf child is still at the center of a century-old debate.
Read the whole thing
TL’DR: The reasons are ableism, not understanding how language works and the fact that Alexander Graham Bell was a dick. (also money, must not forget money)
THIS!
Something that my ASL classes were constantly taught–by a woman who was Hard of Hearing and came from two generations of Deaf family members–was people who are taught ASL and then taught the oral method learn the oral method A) MUCH FASTER and B) are far more proficient in the oral method.
Contrary to what TV and movies will have you believe, lip reading is really freaking hard and most D/deaf people can’t do it and if they can, even fewer do it well.
And she had some tragic stories about kids who severely backslid in their language development because their lazy, ableist parents decided to force the oral method on them because the effort of learning ASL was too difficult for the parents and thus banned their kids from speaking Sign using the justification that the children would be too lazy at learning the oral method if they were simultaneously allowed to continue Signing. It’s utterly cruel.
From the Wikipedia article on oralism, the section on the 19th Century:
Before the Clarke School for the Deaf (now the Clarke School for Hearing and Speech) made its mark in deaf American education in the 1860s, there was a popular support of manualism.[6] Manual language soon became a less popular choice for deaf education due to the new Darwinist perspective
AKA: Eugenics. The reason Alexander Graham Bell wanted oral-only education for deaf children is because he was afraid Deaf people could talk freely to each other, they might fall in love, and two Deaf parents might have Deaf kids.
There’s a post that’s recirculating on my dashboard, today (17 June, 2021), aimed at animators and artists who want to draw people speaking. It’s image-heavy, I don’t have enough oomph to do all the descriptions, and I don’t want to hijack the post. But here’s a link to it:
Take a look at the first two columns, with the phonetic symbols for human speech, along with how those sounds are spelled in English. Then take a look at the second two columns, with photos and drawings of human mouth shapes as they make those sounds.
Absolutely nowhere in that chart is a single sound made by a unique mouth / lip shape. At minimum, there are two different sounds, and some have as many as six.
This is why forcing a child to learn to lipread especially as their first exposure to language, is both absurd and abusive.
