Benefits Of American Sign Language

The book “A Journey into the Deaf-World”, by Harlan Lane, Robert Hoffmeister, and Ben Bahan, is about the different people who are considered deaf: hard-of-hearing, deaf, and CODA. People who are hard-of-hearing are people who don 't hear well; people who are deaf lack the power of hearing since birth; you can be born hearing and throughout time lose some or all of your hearing sense. People who are CODA (children of deaf adults) are often signing because their parents are deaf and CODA’s often are helpful by being interpreters. CODAs become a great link between their parents and the hearing world. This book explains about deaf culture and how sign is a visual and manual way of conversing. The benefits of sign language are many and the ASL “foreign language” is growing among hearing as well. About more than 500,000 people sign in America alone. ASL is dated from 1779, but probably even earlier. Sign language promotes cultural awareness; deaf culture uses sign language as their main form of communicating.

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was a hearing minister that designed American Sign Language, which is the first language used by deaf and hearing people in the United States and Canada. Two thousand hundred million people are using ASL, and at least five thousand hundred people are using it as their most important way of communication. Throughout a period, Deaf people in America were already using sign language, in the early 1800’s; Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet had become friends with a young Deaf girl named Alice. Gallaudet started to teach the girl a few words, and succeeded at doing so. In 1815, Gallaudet went to Europe in search of methods of teaching the Deaf. He approached a number of program directors, the signs used at the school for the deaf, and the signs began to develop into American Sign Language. American Sign Language in America also has

There are numerous facts concerning the Deaf culture that I am not aware of, and a few of those elements have been made known. One of the new facts that surprised me was that approximately 90 percent of Deaf people are married to other Deaf people. This goes along with them being a tight-knit community. Another interesting piece of information I have learned is that I am to focus on a signer’s face, instead of their hands, while they are signing. Once I began to consider the expressions he or she would be showing while signing, and how one should pay attention while talking to another, it made perfect sense.

Language is communicated in various ways. Yet, there are still children who are denied the privilege of having one. Only ten percent of deaf children are born to deaf parents. This means around ninety percent are born to hearing parents. Most hearing parents have never been exposed to American Sign Language (ASL), so they do not teach it to their deaf child. One of the main reasons this happens is hearing parents tend to deny their child's deafness (Gray, n.d.). Instead, they choose to have their baby get a cochlear implant (CI). Parental decisions regarding cochlear implantation may be influenced by what they understand it means to be deaf. Basically, they see being deaf as a disability and are more apt to consider

     ASL is essentially the offspring of native new world sign languages and French Sign Language. LSF merged with the indigenous sign languages when it was brought to the United States in 1817 by Laurent Clerc, a Deaf Frenchman who opened the first American school for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Grammatically, ASL is far removed from English. One common misconception is that ASL is simply silent English; a means of representing English with the hands. Codes such as this do exist, but they are rough hybrids of English grammar and ASL hand

Studies have shown that if a child receives a cochlear implant before the child is 18 months old followed by intensive therapy the child is likely to develop language skills that are comparable to their peers and many children are able to attend mainstream schooling. This sounds great to parents, but what happens when the cochlear implant doesn’t work or if the child doesn’t receive the necessary therapy for understanding sound using the cochlear implant. Because the children were not exposed to American sign language (ASL) this can delay the children education and learning compared to their peers. When children are born to hearing parents they want the child to be like them and be able to hear. To the hearing, deafness is a disability and if there is a way that they can make their child hear, most parents will do everything in their power to make sure they can give that to their child. Then again, many parents forget is that living with a cochlear implant is a lifelong process and involves years to decades of therapy for their child. And if a child receives the implant later than 18 months old it becomes harder for the child to understand speech from a cochlear implant and more intensive therapy for the child. Children start learning language from their parents listening to them talk to others and talk to the baby. If the child is deaf, they are missing this important development of speech, which makes it harder for the child to learn to speak and understanding language. Also, most hearing parents don’t know ASL or sign fluently to be able to teach their children the language and help them to start learning and be able to communicate with society. Today there are still parents that will not learn ASL even though their child is deaf or maybe they received a cochlear implant and it didn’t work. This

For my Deaf event, I attended Deaf Coffee Night at Starbucks. When I walked in, I was happy to be able to look around and see people communicate through the use of only their hands, body and faces. I was also encouraged by the fact that I understood a majority of the signs I saw. After I ordered my drink, I approached a table of two people who were using ASL and I introduced myself. One person at the table was hearing while the other was Deaf, but both were happy to include me in their conversation. We talked for quite awhile about each of our lives. It was interesting to notice that throughout our conversation, the three of us were equally engaged in the conversation at hand about the lives of these strangers. This is a lot different then most conversations in the hearing world since most of the time we do not talk about our lives for that long and when listening to the lives of other people we do not actually care to pay close attention.

Mark Drolsbaugh’s autobiography, Deaf Again goes through his life journey as a deaf individual who tries to find his Deaf identity in the hearing world. Mark was born as a hearing person, but as he got older he gradually started to lose his hearing which made it difficult for him to fit in as “normal child.” When Mark was in kindergarten, he started to feel lost with his classmates and heard less and less. After this incident, his grandfather took him to numerous doctors to find a solution for his hearing loss, but there wasn’t any resolution. Despite the fact having deaf parents who knew sign language, Mark was never encouraged by his parents nor grandparents to communicate in sign language, they were told by doctors that signing would interfere

To fully understand why this is a popular debate, we must first explore Deaf culture. Dr. Beth Sonnenstrahl Benedict from the Hands and Voices organization states that “The American Deaf community values American Sign Language as the core of a culturally Deaf identity” (Benedict par 1). Language is a crucial aspect of a culture, and American Sign Language unifies the Deaf community. Although it is often dismissed as a language, ASL has its own unique sentence structure and vocabulary that make it different from English or any other foreign language. Many believe that allowing a deaf child to learn sign language is essential to them embracing their deafness as well as building

The technique that Clerc taught was by the use of his hands, which he communicated with French sign language, blended with a bit of signs used by students in the United States. To Gallaudet the language was a inspiration which he called it, “Highly poetical,” but to Clerc and many of the deaf people, the using of sign was natural and useful. This was a result of a created acculturated nonverbal language known as American Sign Language (ASL). As new schools for the deaf spread west and south, American sign language also evolved as well in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois. By the year of 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a law constituting the first college in the world for deaf students called Gallaudet University and all these schools used sign as a curriculum.

The Book I decided to read is called “Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf”. In this book the author Oliver Sacks basically focuses on Deaf history and the community of the deaf developed toward linguistic self-sufficiency. Sacks is a Professor of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He became interested in the problem of how deaf children acquire language after reviewing a book by Harlan Lane. The book was titled “When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf”. This book was first published in 1984 and was published again in 1989. Before reading Harlan’s book Sacks did not know any sign language. The book encouraged him to begin studying sign language. Sacks became extremely interested on how the deaf learn to communicate with the ability of sound being nonexistent. He wanted to know what this process may tell us about the nature of language. Seeing Voices is made up of three chapters, the history of the deaf, a discussion of language and the brain, and an evaluation of the problems behind the student strike that occurred at Gallaudet University, in March of 1988.

Recently I attended a seminar for work, on childcare and development, where they discussed how to work with children with hearing disabilities. At this event there was a population of predominantly people who used American Sign Language as their primary language as opposed to hearing people speaking. I have had interactions with deaf people before but only on an informal level, because most of the deaf people I have

According to an online journal by Carla A. Halpern, in 1817, a Connecticut clergyman named Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, opened the first permanent school for the deaf in Hartford (Halpern, C., 1996). This deaf school was for American children which only had seven students and a head teacher by the name of Laurent Clerc. Clec was from the Paris Institution for the Deaf and had been deaf since infancy. He bought to the United States a nonverbal form of communication known as French sign language (Halpern, C., 1996).

The topic for today's reading was Augmentative Communication Systems-Sign Languages, PECS. In the assigned reading and module, we observe that a characteristic of autism is difficulty developing and using verbal speech to communicate with others. The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is used to help children with autism to develop a system for communicating with others across multiple environments. It is used most often with learners that are non-verbal, but can also be used with learners with limited verbal skills. PECS can be used across age ranges, starting in preschool, to help individuals with ASD communicate with others. In fact, research has shown that learners can use PECS to increases their work production

Sign language teaches deaf children to use the other senses such as sight to communicate with others. ASL centers on several techniques such as “hand shape, position, and movement, body movements, gestures, facial expressions, and other visual cues to form its words” instead of sounds and tones in the spoken language (“American Sign Language”).