engleski

Teacher of deaf as language model

Children learn language through social interaction in meaningful situations in all cultures all over the world. Adults support language learning. In order to learn language, a child must have opportunities to interact with fluent language users. Deaf and hard of hearing children enter, and often leave school with poorer language and vocabulary skills in comparison with their hearing peers The language disorders in deaf children often get overlooked due to the deaf children’ s deafness, delayed language development, and inadequate exposure to language models. Recently, deaf education has been moved toward a bilingual-bicultural approach. This approach assumes that sign language should be the first language of deaf children and that spoken language should be taught as a second language. The goal is proficiency in both sign language and written spoken language, as well as socialization in both deaf and hearing cultures. Many research studies show benefit for deaf children from this approach. Teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students should serve as language models for their students. As bilingual education depends upon proficiency in sign language, teachers are expected to have native fluency in sign language. Many hearing teachers, however, are not prepared to teach in sign language. This presentation will discuss the requirements for bilingual-bicultural approach, including teacher’ s abilities and competence in order to be language model to deaf and hard of hearing children.

deaf education; teacher of deaf; bilingual-bicultural approach; sign language

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