June 22, 2000

Among the Deaf, Ubiquitous Sign Language Faces a Challenge


Keith Meyers/ The New York Times
Polly Earl teaching Max Klansky, left, and Joe Speach to communicate through the use of cued speech.
How It Works: Alternative for the Deaf (June 22, 2000)

After decades of intensive lobbying, deaf Americans have gained a place in the national consciousness. American Sign Language interpreters seem to be everywhere, from the State of the Union address to the Miss America pageant. Many universities and high schools now offer sign language as a foreign language course.

But some advocates for the deaf say that a fervent devotion to the exclusive use of sign language by many of the deaf has helped foster a little known and surprising problem: The average 18-year-old deaf American reads at a fourth-grade level.

Whether the problem is because of reliance on sign language, as they say, or stems from other causes, these advocates are seeking to lead a revolution in deaf education through a 34-year-old method called cued speech.

The supporters of cued speech say the overreliance on sign language fosters a kind of false pride in deaf separatism.

Others counter that the poor literacy of the deaf does not stem from reliance on sign language but from the fact that the vast majority of the deaf are born to hearing parents who do not know how to guide their deaf children academically. About 90 percent of the quarter-million Americans who were born deaf or became deaf early have hearing parents.

Crisscrossing the nation like evangelists, the advocates of cued speech, both the deaf and the hearing, are splitting deaf Americans, their families and other advocates in a way that is reminiscent of an earlier battle within black America over whether integration was the best course.

"Some people say using cued speech would make someone more hearing in the mind, like a black person trying to be white," said Alina Engelman, 18, a deaf student of Brooklyn who uses cued speech.

American Sign Language, called signing, bears no relationship to English, its spelling, syntax or grammar. On the other hand, cued speech, which advocates want to be a supplement to sign language, breaks words into syllables and conveys them with hand signals and lip reading, so that a deaf person can link visual signs and sounds to the language as it is written and spoken.

For example, rather than milk being rendered as the act of milking a cow, as it is in sign language, cued speech spells it out letter by letter through lip reading and hand movement, so that when children begin to read and write, they do not have to learn a new language.

Cued speech is being used in a few public school systems across the country, including in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.

And in some cases, its advocates say, it has helped floundering students move to grade level quickly.

"In the first six months of using cued speech, we made a smooth transition from signing to cueing, and my son learned 500 new words," said Sarina Roffe, executive director of New York Cued Speech Center.

Ms. Roffe is a hearing parent whose 24-year-old deaf son, Simon, graduated from one of the city's most selective high schools, Stuyvesant, and then New York University. He began using cued speech when he was 3 1/2 years old.

The deaf felt they had won a degree of autonomy with the official adoption of the American Sign Language, but some now see that autonomy threatened by what they say is an attack on sign language.

Others say it is time to face the academic failing of the deaf and focus on their individual learning needs of the children.

The push for broader teaching and use of cued speech comes at time when vocational jobs often filled by the deaf, like printing and data entry, are being replaced by high-technology jobs that require greater literacy, and when technology is making it increasingly possible for deaf children to gain partial hearing through cochlear implants, a surgical procedure that makes verbal communication easier and facilitates cued speech. The implant resembles a thumb-nail-size piece of Play-Doh with a narrow wire that runs behind the ear and an attachment in the hair.

Other methods for helping the deaf communicate have also been advocated over the years. One is oral-auralism, which is essentially lip reading with the help of hearing aids, and was the main teaching tool for generations when sign language was banned from schools in an effort to make them more like hearing children. Another is signing exact English, which is using a type of sign language to depict English just as it is spoken.

Still another method is auditory verbal therapy, which teaches the maximum use of hearing aids without lip reading. Some schools are using American Sign Language for instruction and conceptual understanding of material and one of the other methods to teach reading and writing.

No studies exist showing that one method works better than another, said Jane Fernandes, provost of Gallaudet University, a college for the deaf in Washington.

"After all these years, people are finally realizing that deaf children can't read, and this is the way they can learn," Mrs. Roffe said of cued speech. "We aren't saying that deaf people should not learn American Sign Language. We are saying that the deaf should know both. Sign is not spoken, has no written form and thus has its own syntax. It is incompatible with spoken or written English, making it difficult to learn to read and write. Cued speech helps the deaf to get around that."

Earlier this month, about 100 families spent a weekend at a campsite beside a sun-dappled lake in Warwick, N.Y., to improve their skills in cued speech. Older students trained toddlers on grassy knolls and parents sat in hot classrooms for hours learning the finer points. Several more camps, run by different advocacy groups for the deaf, are scheduled this summer around the nation. Learning the basics of cued speech takes about 20 hours.

Neither the National Cued Speech Center in Rochester nor the New York Cued Speech Center in Brooklyn has figures on how many people use the system. But Mrs. Roffe estimates that more than 3,000 people have been trained in it.

Opposition to cued speech is strong.

Susan M. Mather, a professor of American Sign Language, linguistics and interpretation at Gallaudet, said the poor literacy rate had nothing to do with sign language but was the result of low involvement from hearing parents with their deaf children from the very beginning.

"These children are not getting the attention they need from the start," Professor Mather, who is deaf and has deaf children, said through a translator. "Hearing parents are afraid if their kids learn A.S.L., they will never see them again. They will only be involved in the deaf world. That is not true."

The deaf children of deaf parents perform slightly better in school than deaf children of hearing parents, experts say, because they learn American Sign Language earlier. While they still encounter the problems of reading and writing, they have the confidence to overcome it because they have been socialized differently than children of hearing parents, the experts say.

Robert R. Davila, vice president of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, said methods like cued speech should be used to improve literacy because they required the entire family to get involved. But Dr. Davila disagreed that American Sign Language was the cause of poor literacy among the deaf.

"Many deaf individuals are bilingual in A.S.L. and English just as many Hispanic children are bilingual in Spanish and English," said Dr. Davila, who is Mexican-American. "It is wrong to blame A.S.L. for having poor English. We don't blame Spanish for having poor English."

Cued speech was invented by R. Orin Cornet in 1966 shortly after William C. Stokoe Jr., a linguistics professor, successfully pushed for signing to be recognized as a language and helped end a century-long banishment of signing from classrooms.

Cued speech was dwarfed by the focus on signing, but Dr. Cornet, a physicist and mathematician with hearing, pressed on to improve literacy among the deaf students. Even then, deaf educators realized that something needed to be done about the literacy rate of the deaf. So Dr. Cornet developed a system where people could see the spoken word.

Dr. Cornet set up a department at Gallaudet and the technique spread slowly. Small programs were started

in Washington and adjacent Montgomery County, Md. Studies showed that deaf children using cued speech had comparable language skills as their peers with hearing. Today, Montgomery County has one of the largest cued speech public school divisions in the country, along with Minnesota and North Carolina.

Today, however, many doctors are recommending that cued speech be used with the cochlear implants, which increase hearing and help people with lip reading.

In cued speech, the cues are quick strokes of the finger across the cheek, the neck and chin. And it encourages users to use their voices.

Carol Sereda, 39, a hearing parent, said: "If I want to say, 'If you want to go out to play, you have to eat your crackers first,' in sign language, 'I would sign, cracker, eat, finish, play, can. With cued speech, I would cue it in plain English. It's great."

Teaching children to write through cued speech is easier, said Karen Doenges, a speech-language specialist in Rosemount, Minn.

"If I want to teach a child to write milk in cued speech, it would not be difficult," Ms. Doenges said. "But in American Sign Language the symbol for milk looks like you're milking a cow. When they are trying to figure out the 'm' on the page and the 'i' and 'l' and 'k,' there is no code to match it up with. What cued speech does is try to match the sounds of the language and turn it into a visual thing." In the classroom, cued speech requires a person to translate, or cue, what the instructor says. Ms. Engelman, the deaf student, has had translators since kindergarten.

"I would be at a disadvantage without cued speech because I would learn only American Sign Language and everyone would be communicating in English," she said. "That is not to say that I don't like A.S.L. But I would be like, where do you put the 'a' and 'the.' It would be hard."



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