Life in 2 Languages: Spoken and Silent

By ANNA GORMAN

Jan. 9, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Imagine being a parent of a 4-year-old eager to learn to read.

But you can’t sing the alphabet song with him. Nor can you listen to “Sesame Street” together. You can’t teach him how to sound out consonants and vowels. And you can’t tell if his utterances are words or gibberish.

This is what deaf parents of hearing children face every day.

Yet like all parents, they want their children to read at the same level as their kindergarten and first-grade peers. And they know that their children will be held to the same standards as other hearing children.

So with a combination of sign language, technology and tutors, deaf parents are doing everything they can to teach their kids to read and enjoy reading in a sound-rich world.

“Obviously it’s easier for hearing parents,” signed Sharlene Perry, a deaf mother of a 4-year-old hearing daughter. “And some deaf parents do have trouble. But I don’t see it as a challenge.”

Others do. The reason, they say, is that the interaction between deaf parent and hearing child ultimately requires two languages: one spoken, the other silent.

This wrinkle often means the children of hearing-impaired parents can lag behind their peers in the crucial areas of phonics, pronunciation and verbal inflection during the elementary school years.

“It is not surprising that many of them face mispronunciation in their early years,” said Lawrence Fleischer, head of the Deaf Studies Department at Cal State Northridge. “But most of them exhibit no problem with it by the time they are in junior high school. In a way, they outgrow the problems.”

The children of deaf parents generally learn to sign before they learn to speak, and they are especially attuned to body language and facial expressions, Fleischer said. These critical skills allow a deaf parent to monitor a child’s understanding of sequence and context.

Perry agrees that teaching comprehension is easy. In her Ventura home, she cuddles on the couch every day with her daughter, Tina Longbine, to sign stories together.

As they look through Tina’s favorite Pooh Bear and Lion King books, Perry asks her daughter to sign who is in the pictures and what they are doing. Tina answers in sign language, and sometimes with spoken words.

Then Perry signs the story--page by page--and frequently stops to check if the preschooler knows what the words mean.

“With sign language, we talk the story through,” Perry said. “Whatever she doesn’t understand, we go over again and again.”

Day by day, Tina is learning which sign correlates with which word. When Tina gets a little older, she will simultaneously sign the words and read them aloud, while her mom points to each. At preschool, Tina’s teachers help her learn to pronounce the words.

To further help children understand stories, deaf parents often act out the events and encourage their children to play along. In this way, children can sign and speak during the role-playing skits, thus bringing together the signed and spoken worlds.

Deaf parents also stress writing as a way of checking their child’s comprehension. They post “to do” and shopping lists around the house, record events on a family calendar and label objects.

For many hearing children of deaf parents, however, the problem comes with oral fluency and pronunciation. While the children may learn to sign a story without too much trouble, they have more difficulty learning how to pronounce the words.

Without their parents as models, the children don’t learn how to pause after periods, or how to change the inflection of their voice to convey questions.

Fleischer, who is deaf, said his hearing son Flann, 26, struggled as a child. Because Flann learned to read from deaf parents, his comprehension was fine but his phonics skills were weak. And when he got to school, teachers were not willing to stray from their traditional teaching methods to help him.

“There was a big mismatch,” Fleischer said. “Most teachers were deadlocked in their teaching techniques and unwilling to make further adaptations, and more importantly, to accept the fact that there are many different mechanisms of learning to read.”

Fleischer said teachers need to be aware of challenges facing hearing children with deaf parents.

Patty and Tony Ivankovic are aware of those challenges, and for good reason.

Both are deaf and have three hearing children: Joelyn, 8; Jacqueline, 5; and Jonathan, 3. Patty is a teacher in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Program in the Burbank Unified School District, and Tony is a resource specialist at the National Center for Deafness at Cal State Northridge.

They decided to place their children in Patty Ivankovic’s preschool class from age 2 until 5. Two-thirds of the class is deaf; the rest can hear. Most of the hearing children have either a deaf sibling or deaf parents.

In the class, Ivankovic does a lot of group reading. With well-known folk tales such as “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” she points to the words as the students sign and read them aloud. The bicultural environment, she said, helped her children’s literacy skills and self-esteem.

Ivankovic said Joelyn scored above average on her reading and language standardized tests in both first and second grade.

The only issue that Joelyn’s teachers point out is that she reads in a monotone, a problem that her parents can’t help her overcome. Neither Patty nor Tony can monitor emotions or tones in their daughter’s voice.

But Patty Ivankovic said she isn’t concerned about her children’s pronunciation.

“We live in a hearing world, so they hear how words are pronounced correctly from their teachers, hearing family members and peers,” she said.

Other deaf parents aren’t so confident. So they use phonics audiotapes and CD-ROMs that allow children to hear pronunciation. The computer voice synthesizer says a word, and children can practice saying the same word into a microphone.

Deaf parents also sit with their children in front of closed captioning television. As the words appear on the TV screen, the parent can sign them and the child can hear the voices on the television.

“Not only can the [closed captioning] help people with hearing loss, but it can also help hearing children learn to read,” said David Baquis, technology director for Self Help for Hard of Hearing People. “The children see the correlation between the printed word and text and what they are hearing out loud.”

And sometimes deaf parents hire hearing tutors who are fluent in sign language to work with their children on reading. Sandy Kessler, a community advocate at the Tri-County Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness, raised a hearing son and daughter in Simi Valley.

She was worried about her children keeping up with their peers, so she hired a hearing tutor to work with them on pronunciation while she helped them on comprehension. Kessler’s children signed stories to her, and read them to a tutor.

“The hard part was that my mom couldn’t teach me how to say the words,” said Kessler’s daughter, Goldie Sparks, 17. “It was helpful that I went to a tutor. That way I got to learn two different languages at the same time.”

Now, the high school senior said, she can never put down a book.

Kessler tells deaf parents to start signing stories to children as soon as they are born.

“It doesn’t matter if they can’t understand yet,” she said. “Babies are fascinated with signs. Once they know sign language, they can be more communicative, imaginative and creative. And knowing sign language will help them with reading.”

More Details

People seeking more information about the challenges deaf parents face as they teach their hearing children to read can contact the following groups:

* Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness (GLAD)

2222 Laverna Ave., Eagle Rock, CA 90041

(323) 478-8000

* Tri-County Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness

614 E. Main St., Ventura, CA 93001

(805) 648-4523

* TRIPOD (with Burbank Unified School District)

1727 W. Burbank Blvd., Burbank, CA 91506

(818) 972-2080

* Orange County Deaf Equal Access Foundation