The Importance Of Reading In English

Reading is an acquired skill, developed through explicit teaching and founded upon a child’s innate ability to hear and process sounds from birth. Beginning at birth exposure to oral language, gestures and the functions of communication (Fellows & Oakley, 2010 p.165) allows exploration of sounds and words and their connection to each other, and introduces cue systems that will later assist in decoding complex text as development of reading ability occurs. Cue systems including linguistic rules of speech, such as grammatical, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic structures (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2004, p. 324), provide readers with strategies and knowledge for comprehension and phonological awareness (Gascoigne, 2005, p. 1). Rich language exchanges

American Annals of the Deaf is an educational journal that is committed to providing educational experiences of high quality as well as related services for the deaf. This journal has been around for over 150 years, and over time they have been dedicated to making sure that children and adults who are deaf or hard of hearing are receiving quality assistance for their disability (NEED CITATION). In July 1996, they published a scholarly article in response to a survey Catherine Gillespie and Sandra Twardosz conducted about the literacy environment and different practices that children are receiving in a residential school for the deaf.

If you couldn’t read or write, how would you tackle your daily life? Being literate is a crucial part of everyone’s life; reading and writing are essential for a person’s success. Every single day, it’s used, whether it’s for an Advanced Placement Language class or reading a billboard as you’re driving past. As a child, I grew up reading on a daily basis and I believe that I am as successful as I am on behalf of it. Countless memories have been created, thanks to the multiple books that have been read and the umpteen amount of papers that I’ve written. Throughout the numerous years of my education, my teachers and parents left a long lasting impact on my reading and writing skills.

By researching this topic, I intend to correct the extremely common misconception that ASL is just “English for Deaf people”, which I also believed before taking multiple classes on the subject.

For centuries, the disabled have been silently oppressed. Their rights have been overlooked, they have been mocked and made fun of, and they’ve been stereotyped to no end. Specifically, the Deaf community have dealt with lack of sign language interpreters, vicious bullying, and the stereotype of “deaf is dumb”. Contrary to this generalization, many deaf people have been extremely successful in careers from acting and modeling to medicine and science. Also, many hearing people use Sign Language with their babies, and studies have shown that it is very beneficial for a child to learn Sign Language.

During registration last semester, when I decided to take this course to see if I wanted to continue onward with ASL as my minor, I was not sure what to expect. Through my brief introduction of Deaf culture during my first sign language courses, I knew some vague details about historical events. Gallaudet had been mentioned several times within not only my workbook, but also by my professor. I could have given you a short synopsis of the oral movement that threatened to wipe ASL out as a language. Though I knew these facts, and a few traits about Deaf culture that I had experienced firsthand, there was so much that I had not considered before the readings and journals for this course opened my eyes.

According to Richardson (2004), approximately 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. Unfortunately, without developing linguistic skills early on in life, the deaf are more likely use English as a second language. “Deaf individuals tend to have low-status jobs, limited education, high employment and face cultural and linguistics

The visual language used by most deaf people in America is American Sign Language. Within ASL, fingerspelling is an important part of ASL. ASL signs are referred as fingerspelling signs. Fingerspelling creates a way by representing the symbols of written English (Valli & Lucas, 2000). Research on fingerspelling conducted by Robbin Battison, an ASL linguist, found English word in print is characterized with ASL signs because of the letters of fingerspelling represents the letter handshapes resembles the English print which has direct contact. Some deaf children receive an opportunity accessing and acquire ASL at home before entering school (Padden & Ramsey, 1998). Previous researches have demonstrated early acquisition of ASL fingerspelling

Despite the perceived limitations of being Deaf or hearing impaired and various forms of oppression and social injustice, Deaf Americans identify themselves as members of a cultural community and linguistic group – which highly values literacy. Through the use of American Sign Language (ASL), Deaf and hearing impaired individuals and groups are given a unique way to express themselves personally – and with that, a totally different way to communicate through hands, faces and bodies without the use of sound. “Deaf culture focuses on the stimulation of the eyes and the enhanced visual

This paper is a review of two articles published by Paul Miller in the Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities. The first is entitled, “The role of phonology in the word decoding skills of poor readers: evidence from individuals with prelingual deafness or diagnosed dyslexia,” and was written in 2007. The second, written in 2010, is named, “Phonological, orthographic, and syntactic awareness and their relation to reading comprehension in prelingually deaf individuals: what can we learn from skilled readers?” At their heart, the articles attempt to address what explains good and poor readers in the deaf community, rejecting previous assumptions in the literature in this area. The studies are carefully designed, and attempt to address

Auditory challenged individuals are comprised of nearly 10,000,000 hard-of-hearing and 1,000,000 functionally deaf Americans and a half a million were born or diagnosed deaf before turning eighteen years old in the United States (Mitchell 2006). A great percentage of this demographic primary language is American Sign Language (ASL). These individuals are considered a verbal minority. Within the deaf community “deaf” is defined as people who have been deaf or hard of hearing entirely or most of their lives. In addition to sign language, auditory challenged individuals use broken speech usually no higher than a fourth grade level (Hauser, O’Hearn, McKee, Steider, & Thew 2010). The basic deaf education curriculum does not build a solid

Imagine one day you walk into a room, in which everybody is talking and laughing but the only thing you can possibly hear is a very faint noise. How would you feel about your inability to communicate? About 13% the total U.S. population is deaf or hearing impaired (Harrington). It is impossible for them to go to clothing store without a deaf interpreter which makes them feel as not self-sufficient and isolated from the rest of the society. Past research has examined that by implementing American sign language in public secondary schools as a foreign language elective can effectively diminish the number of isolationism incidence among deaf and hearing impaired individuals (Pfeiffer 88). However, the major obstacle faced when implementing ASL as a language

Though I know American Sign Language has variations in signs depending upon region, I did not fully understand the differences, and how similar dialects in ASL are to dialects in spoke language. I assumed there were dialect differences because the Signing Naturally videos often had different signs then what was taught in class, but I could use context clues to establish the meaning. For example, the signs for daughter and son were slightly different as “baby” part of the sign was shortened. However, it was interesting to read how different it is for native signers. In chapter 14 a veteran firefighter explained his many encounters on the job with uneducated and underprivileged signers who were hard to understand (140). Reading that from the perspective of a native signer, I wonder how hard it would be for a learn, like myself, to come across a native signer whose dialect drastically differed my own.

In America, English exists as the standard language. For that reason, it is understood that children will learn this as their primary language. However, according to the “National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders” website, “about two to three children per 1,000 are born deaf or hard of hearing”(Quick Statistics [NIDCD Health Information]) . Moreover, an article by Karen Kalivoda points out that “depending on the age of onset and the severity of the hearing loss, an individual's spoken language development may be radically affected”. Babies learn to speak by parroting the sounds around them; however, a deaf child does not hear these noises and, therefore, the child does not “develop their language” skills

Reading and writing are both important; you can’t have one without the other. They are skills that are increased constantly due to little things that most times are not noticed. Whether it is from a book to a poem, there will always be a way that it helps out your school performance. Reading and writing in general only helps absorb information, and enhance leisure or school related writing tasks. It has also made life itself so much easier because reading and writing are so beneficial for school and for life. How much you read and write today, will somehow affect your future job, family, position, or even your salary.