Value of Teaching Deaf to Speak Still Debated : Study: Research shows that reading scores are higher for those who can talk. But enthusiasm is muted among those who value sign language.

The debate over whether to teach deaf children how to speak is unlikely to wane, educators say, despite a study showing that reading scores were strongly higher for those able to speak.

“It’s a very emotional controversy,” said Jean Moog, principal of Central Institute for the Deaf, where the federally funded study was done in 1988. “I think what we’re trying to do is bring some rationale to the topic.”

In the study of 100 profoundly deaf 16- and 17-year-old students who had been taught speech, reading scores were five grade levels higher than the third-grade nationwide average for profoundly deaf students. Thirty of the 100 read at or above the 10th-grade level, said Ann Geers, who led the research.

“That means they were functioning for all practical purposes like normal-hearing adolescents, which is rather outstanding considering the severity of their deafness,” Geers said.

Profoundly deaf people, even with the most powerful hearing aids, cannot understand speech without special training, though they may hear some sounds.

The report has been well-received by supporters of teaching the deaf to speak, but Moog said those who favor total communication, a combination of speech and sign language used in 90% of the schools, are less enthusiastic.

The hit movie “Children of a Lesser God” dealt with the moral question of whether the deaf should be integrated, sometimes against their will, into the speaking world. Sign language is easier to teach than speech, but may be of little or no use except among other deaf people.

According to Helen Bayer, coordinator of the St. Louis County Special School District deaf education program, choosing between the two extremes and a myriad of choices between depends on factors such as intelligence, other learning disabilities and family support.

“I’ve enjoyed great success with some profoundly deaf students in teaching them to talk, and I’ve interacted with others where it was a very painful experience in which their self-confidence was destroyed,” Bayer said.

In the typical total communication program, research has shown that students depend too much on sign language, Moog said. “They make noises, they vocalize, but speech is not intelligible without the signs.”

Deaf children in total communications programs also don’t read as well because they aren’t given intensive instruction in speech and language, Geers said. If deaf students are to reach their full potential, they must be taught to speak at an early age, before signing is learned, she said.

To participate in the study, teen-agers had to have been profoundly deaf before they learned language. They had to have been educated in an oral setting only and to have a normal IQ with no significant educational handicaps.

In reading ability, Moog said, “what appeared to make the most difference was their facility with English, the extent to which they mastered vocabulary, understood syntactic structure and how to form complex sentences, how to write them, how to speak them and how to understand them when they were spoken.”

Of the 20,000 profoundly deaf people under age 21 in the United States, only about 10% are taught in oral communication programs that emphasize the limited hearing they have, lip-reading and speaking.

“If you want deaf children to talk, it takes a lot of work on speech,” Moog said. On average, children in a total communication program receive two or three half-hour speech lessons a week and end up using mostly sign language.

“The profound effect will come within the next 10 years when all deaf children being educated in total communication programs are not talking,” she said. “There will be an entire generation of deaf children who will be angry that they were not given the instruction to talk.”

Proponents of total communication say that teaching speech takes more time and effort and that many preschool children in oral-only programs are unable to communicate in any form for a few years.

“I’ve always referred to it as a religious war,” Bayer said. “It’s sort of like finding passages in the Bible that will support your position.”