Reply #10: Hi there David!

[FunkyLeprechaun]

AllDeaf has posted my articles before, so you may have seen my real name!

I also helped my university get ASL as a foreign language option. They had not considered it as a foreign language due no books being printed in ASL (aside from the Learning ASL books).

I do have my reservations with ASL as a whole, but if it's to help your child communicate with you and your wife, that's great! When I have a child, I'll do Cued Speech with them if I can. I was a patient of Dr Daniel Ling's and he stressed that if my parents wanted me to learn how to speak English well, I shouldn't use CS or sign language when speaking English. As a result my speech is quite good for someone who was born profoundly deaf but my Cued Speech skills are quite rusty. That's okay, I interact mostly with hearing people and my CS skills come back quite easily, albeit slowly, when I hang out with my friends who do use CS.

I know that people advocate using sign language with their hearing babies but how does this affect their later speech skills? I asked my brother-in-law if he had considered using BSL with his son and he looked into it but he didn't think it would help his son with his English speech proficiency skills (his son is hearing).

I'm also writing a dissertation for my MA on deaf access in museums. I chose this subject because I feel that museums can be clueless when it comes to deaf people, especially when I was reading an entry in Museums Journal, profiling a woman who worked for the Tate Modern. She basically said that deaf people who used BSL (British Sign Language) can't read and may not understand what the artwork's label says and I know university educated deaf people who use ASL most of the time! However, I think museums emphasize too much on Sign Language when offering access to deaf people (especially for tours or courses offered by the museum) and am suggesting they approach a script/CC-style access. I used CART at University and it would be useful for Museums' lectures/courses. The reason being that I feel that there are foreign deaf visitors to the museum and they may not understand a different sign language method (believe me BSL is so different from ASL) so offering a script/CC access will give greater scope of access to deaf visitors. I know deaf people from Paris and Geneva who would benefit from this approach.

I also had bad experiences with Deaf Culture when I was younger. Deaf culture people accused my parents of committing Genocide and told them they were abusing me by not using ASL. I was the first deaf child in the state of Minnesota to go to mainstream school and both ASL and hearing people didn't feel I belonged there (they felt that I would do well at MSAD). I had proven them wrong as I graduated HS with a 3.6 GPA, have a degree from one of the nation's top universities and now working on my MA from the University of Leicester. There are many deaf children in mainstream schools now and in my old school district, they had to let go the CS transliterators and the ASL interpreters because the deaf children now wear CIs and are so good at listening that they don't need them. MSAD's enrollment rates have fallen and I think they were thinking about making the school a mixed method school, I also think it's the same for Gallaudet as well.

I do support ASL as a second, third or fourth language but I feel if a parent is hearing with a deaf baby, it's important that the deaf child learns his/her parents' language first and understand it. The access to literacy for deaf children is so important. However, I have a somewhat different position when it comes to CODAs, they need to be able to communicate with their deaf parents (whatever method they use) but I think the exposure to English/other languages as a transition to literacy is important.