On Teaching English - 
Some General Musings and Potential Directions

Being the mother of a deaf child has sharpened my appreciation for the building-blocks of language, and it continues to change the way I look at language-learning.  I already see several differences in the way I conceive of both the structure of spoken and written languages, and the foundations knowledge needed for literacy.  I'm sure there will be many more developments and considerable effects on my teaching of college-level rhetoric and literature, as Lena grows and learns to read and write at more complex levels.  Her inherent need for text in order to communicate fully in English is bound to lead to some interesting discoveries for both of us in the areas of learning rhetorical skills, language competence, and (perhaps especially interesting to readers of Kairos) computer-mediated communication.  I'll divide my comments in this section into rhetorical concerns and content-driven concerns: a simplified verba and res.

As Lena learns the rudimentary structure and vocabulary of English, I have noticed that she repeats certain patterns or cycles in her development that are analogous (even if in a very general way) to patterns in higher levels of language-learning, ones I have observed in my college-level writing students and even in myself as late as graduate school.  It is as if we establish our patterns of learning at the very early stages in our life, and later cycles of learning move in the same channels formed in young childhood.  As Lena absorbed the English language, she would go through (and continues to go through) periods of rapid vocabulary growth, alternating with periods of expanded syntactical and semantic comprehension, and followed by what appears to be temporary saturation and a plateau in understanding.  The appearance of plateaus, however, is deceiving.  I believe that these are really times of processing and growth.  Inside, her brain is ordering and growing, filling up and developing all those preprogrammed areas that await language content.  Just when I become frustrated and begin to think she is not making any "progress," she demonstrates more sophisticated understanding with an expressive jump.  Typically, a deaf child (or a hearing child, for that matter, but more so for deaf children) understands receptively at a significantly higher level than language she can produce expressively.  That is one of the hardest parts of raising a deaf child:  I have to wait, to have faith that what I am doing will work.   When the expressive breakthroughs emerge, I see where my faith as a teacher has paid off, and reassess the next direction for potential growth.  The same can be said for just about any level of language-learning.  I see this same phenomenon among college freshmen, who are reading material at a considerably higher level than in their high-school experience.  At first, their writing will remain at the lower level of development and competence, but just about after Thanksgiving first semester, student writing begins to take on a new tone and vigor, if much reading (of secondary sources and other student texts), practicing, and self-conscious, guided examination of language has preceded.  In my own experience, I can remember a semester during my master's degree program when I suddenly felt I had lost the ability to speak intelligently.  The truth was that I had too much new information in my recent experience, and I had simply to wait while my brain worked through a processing and ordering stage.  Within a few months, I emerged feeling much more confident about my language competence.  It would be an interesting study to compare the language-learning cycles of young children, particularly late language-learners like Lena, to the developing writing process that college students go through, especially ESL students or multicultural students and speakers of differing dialects.

Another aspect of what I might call verba is the way Lena is learning that she must position herself socially in order to use language appropriately.  This is a common theme in freshman English classes and of course a touchstone of rhetoric from its classical origins.  Lena quickly learned that her present classmates at school do not know how to cue, so she speaks without cue at school, but cues-and-speaks to me at home.  This is very interesting rhetorically, and something I will learn more about, I am sure, as she gains more proficiency in both English (and later, sign) and encounters more audiences and conversation partners, both hearing and deaf.

As Lena gains competence in written language, I am sure she will use computer mediated communication (CMC) to facilitate more communication with a wider array of audiences, which she might otherwise find difficult to experience because of her hearing and speech impairments.  CMC will broaden her communicative horizons, as it has for so many hearing people.  It is my hope that, in the process, her language competence will improve through CMC, and I believe it will if she is guided in her choice of audiences and correspondents.  In my college-level teaching experience, I have had the opportunity to teach freshman writing in a CMC classroom, where peer editing and discussion groups about student drafts occurred in real-time "chat groups."  I believe Lena will be very well-suited for this kind of environment, and such methods could make the classroom, students and teacher alike, very accessible to her.

Teaching Lena has also given me a new perspective on some aspects of teaching literature, both in its technical components and in its role as part of the content of our culture -- a foundation of res in the discourse of any literate community.  On the structural side of teaching literature, my teaching of poetry has gained more depth where it concerns the nature of sound as the basis for spoken and written language.  My students at the United States Naval Academy take for granted their ability to detect rhythm and rhyme, assonance and alliteration, and the other devices of sound that make spoken language memorable and attractive.  For a profoundly deaf individual whose native mode of communication is sign, the idea of a syllable, or a "stress" on a syllable, is almost entirely abstract rather than experiential.  Aspects of language that I paid little attention to in my teaching have suddenly taken on new meaning and importance for me.  The natural pitches of various consonants and vowel sounds, which can give a poem such a varied and subtle tone, are important to the deaf.  Some people can hear low-pitched voice sounds like /o/ and /b/, but not the high-pitched ones like /s/, /f/ or /ee/.  How different one's perception of spoken language would be without this information.  Would poetry without sound have the same meaning at all?  I am especially careful now, when I teach, to try to impart an appreciation of sound in poetry and language in general.

In the area of cultural content, there is much for college-level English students and teachers to learn from the deaf about common understanding and the harms which exclusion from a culture can cause.  Without an extensive, internalized knowledge of English idiom and figure of speech, learning to read (and therefore to write) at advanced levels will continue to be difficult for a large portion of the deaf population.  Access to works of great (or even not so great) literature, published scholarly works in any area of study, or the language of legal documentation, will remain in large part impenetrable.  It is common knowledge in the deaf community that the entry-level English language requirement for Gallaudet University is an eighth-grade reading level on standardized tests, and that students seldom improve that level significantly during the course of studies. These are difficult requirements for most deaf students to meet, and the students at Gallaudet are generally exceptionally bright.  What appears to be needed is a tool in children's deaf education, and/or in the parent-and-child methods of choice, which can make spoken language entirely accessible to vision -- a tool like Cued Speech.  If children have easy and frequent access to any language from the beginning, they generally learn it with native skill.  Many Cued Speech children have learned multiple (oral) foreign languages with relative ease -- something that is not usually included in the curriculums of the deaf.  They understand and have experienced, through the visual mode, traits in language such as accent and dialect.  And of course, this access to multiple oral cultures does not exclude the possibility of entering Deaf culture to some degree.  Most English-using Cued Speech natives also learn ASL at some point, to communicate with their Deaf peers socially.  Some have even attended Gallaudet.  The degree to which Cued Speech users and cochlear implant recipients are included in or excluded from Deaf culture, as they move toward inclusion in the English-language culture, remains to be seen.  Is membership in each culture mutually exclusive?  Isn't there room for cross-cultural and bicultural experience, influence, and growth, on both sides?

On To Works Consulted