Education of The Deaf - The Learning Process Debate

The Learning Process Debate

Manualists claim that oralists neglect the psychosocial development of deaf children, and that because oral education requires students to spend time learning speechreading, speech, and English skills that would otherwise be spent learning content, the extensive practice required leaves students with less time and energy to advance academically and socially. Manualists believe oralist teaching methods result in inadequate skills and often poor speaking ability despite the great effort invested. They also feel that what is most important is giving deaf children a visual-motor language they can truly master, so as to enable their intellect to develop normally.

Oralists claim that manualists neglect the residual hearing in deaf children and that their emphasis on sign language isolates them from wider culture and hearing family members, thus serving to restrict them to a limited subculture that leaves them unable to succeed in the general population. They would also point to higher levels of educational success and assimilation into hearing society for deaf individuals. Manualists would reply that while the concerns of isolation used to be true, the general change in attitude toward those who are deaf and hard of hearing, the advent of various alternative communication devices, and federal and state laws protecting their rights have given rise to greater accessibility and inclusion in many areas of life. Additionally, reports of higher success for children educated using the oral method are often based on children who have a high amount of residual hearing and are therefore better able to learn using spoken English than their more profoundly deaf peers might be.

Oralists also point out that only a tiny percentage of the general population can use sign language: for example, although as much as ten percent of the US population is deaf or hard of hearing, the most recent estimates place the number of ASL users in the United States at roughly between 100,000 and 500,000, or between 0.03% and 0.15% of the population, and BSL users in the UK are estimated at 145,000, or about 0.2% of the population.

Another manualist concern is that many deaf children may not accomplish proficiency in lip-reading and other oralist techniques due to the great degree of time and effort involved. This may change with the use of new computer speech instruction methods with visual feedback capabilities that can assist the deaf speaker's articulations and improve their sound production with much less time and effort involved. Similarly, speech reading (also known as lip reading) can also be done with computer programs at greater efficiency.

Recently, some have been advocating for a combination of these two methods. The National Association of the Deaf officially supports a dual language development system. According to the NAD, a bilingual approach uses both American Sign Language and English in educating deaf infants, children, and youth. The NAD supports this idea because they claim that American Sign Language is critical for deaf children to learn early in life so that language acquisition happens at an appropriate time, and that teaching children English and ASL will promote language development to ensure that development occurs for deaf children at a rate comparable to that of their hearing peers. The NAD states that American Sign Language is recognized sign language of the deaf community in the United States. They also state that "preparing deaf children to achieve optimal linguistic fluency in both ASL and English enables them to later engage in meaningful adult discourse as fully participating, contributing, and productive members of American society."