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DEAFNESS & LITERACY: WHY CAN'T SAM READ?

Carol J. Erting
Abstract
Success in teaching deaf pupils to read has not increased in many
decades, but new conceptualizations of literacy, clear understanding
that deafness is a human condition not a deficit, and recent research
on how deaf families accomplish what schools often do not-all point
to better ways of introducing deaf children to written language.
The deaf reader's problems
The difficulty a deaf person faces in trying to read a popular
book is well summed up in the thoughts of Sam, a deaf charac-
ter in an article by the deaf author Shanny Mow. Sam, alone in
the living room, has picked up Remarque's All Quiet on the
Western Front,but almost immediately he picks up the dictio-
nary:
What are haricot beans? mess-tin? dollop? voracity? Already four
words out of your vocabulary, all from the first paragraph on the first
page! You read this classic as an adult while others read it in their
teens. You are lucky you can recognize the words as English.... In
addition, there are unfamiliar idioms, colloquialisms, and expres-
sions. The difficult language which you have never mastered makes
for difficult reading. As if it isnot enough, you lack the background in-
formation necessary for comprehension of the subject. Scratch out
another-or your last-reliable source of information (Mow 1976: 10-
11 ).
To many these words ring true. Whether educators charged
with teaching deaf children to read, parents concerned with a
deaf child's academic progress, or deaf individuals who have
struggled to learn English literacy skills-all are painfully
aware of what the statistics confirm: the average reading level
of deaf high school graduates in the US. remains, after decades
of little improvement, at roughly the third or fourth grade level
(Allen 1986: 164-5). Why?
There is one line of thinking that might lead us closer to an-
swering this most perplexing and critical question. First a clear
view is needed of deafness and the challenges that deaf chil-
dren, their parents, and their teachers face. Next some recent
conceptualizations of literacy present a helpful definition of the
@1992, Linstok Press See note inside front cover ISSN 0302 1475
97
 Erting SLS 75

process of learning to read and write. Finally, drawing upon

data from research that deaf colleagues and I are currently con-
ducting with deaf families, I will argue that we have much to
learn from the study of literacy and how it is taught and learned
in the natural environments of home, community, and culture.
I begin with the basic question, How do we see the deaf
child? because the assumptions, the set of beliefs we hold about
that child, are fundamental in shaping our expectations and our
behaviors as parents and professionals. Deafness creates a rela-
tionship to the world that is primarily visual (Erting 1982,
1985; Sacks 1990). Ben Bahan, an articulate spokesman of the
Deaf vision (1989), has suggested replacing the label "deaf
person" with "seeing person" so that the emphasis shifts away
from the deficit (lack of hearing) toward the positive way in
which deaf people relate to the world-through their eyes.
While it is true that deaf children can't hear, it is more im-
portant to emphasize that they do see. And, through seeing, not
hearing, deaf people have created a visual language and a vi-
sual culture. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, in their book
Deaf in America (1988), point out that for Deaf and hearing
people there are differing sets of assumptions about deafness
and different points from which deviation is measured. For
members of the Deaf culture, DEAF, being visual, is the norm-
it is both valued and taken for granted. HEARING is the other,
the unknown.
Hearing people typically see deafness in pathological terms
(Woodward 1989), as a deficit, a disability, a handicap, a con-
dition to be repaired. Paddy Ladd (i.p.), a deaf leader from
Great Britain, can't imagine wanting to have his hearing re-
stored. Deaf people have deaf minds, he claims, and restoring
the physiological condition of hearing will not change that. The
deaf mind, for Ladd, is a cultural construct; it is a way of being
in and thinking about the world. Deaf children, in this view, are
different, not deficient. Their access to the world and, thus, to
language and education, is achieved primarily through vision.
Understanding this difference is fundamental to understanding
the deaf experience. And understanding that this difference is
not a difference of choice, not a voluntary condition, is funda-
Spring 1992 Deafness &Literacy
mental to conceptualizing our role as educators and parents of
deaf children.
While a deaf individual may choose whether or not to be an
active participant in the Deaf community, that deaf person can-
not choose to hear-no amount of practice, hard work, or de-
sire will transform that person into an individual who uses
hearing in as primary a way as vision. It is our task as educa-
tors to create a linguistic and learning environment that is fully
accessible to the child, rather than expect the child to commu-
nicate and learn in ways that are physiologically impossible for
her. It is my belief that we in the educational establishment
have not yet created such environments for deaf children, and if
we were to do so, we would begin to see significant improve-
ments in literacy skills.
Clear connections between an accessible learning environ-
ment and literacy can be found in the thinking about literacy
advanced by Vygotsky (1978) and Bruner (1983). They em-
phasize the role of social interaction in the individual's spoken
and written language development. Numerous researchers be-
lieve that social interactionist theories have the most to offer
those of us who are attempting to understand literacy develop-
ment in young children (Heath 1983, Taylor 1983, Scheiffelin
and Gilmore 1986, Cazden 1988, Tharp & Gallimore 1988,
Dyson 1989, Garton & Pratt 1989, Ramsey 1990).
Vygotsky's central thesis is that an individual's mental pro-
cesses derive from the social context within which they
develop. In addition, thought and intellectual development
depend on language that is culturally and historically created
through social interaction (Garton & Pratt 1989). Vygotsky
emphasized the importance to the child of adults and more
capable peers as interactional partners, guiding the child toward
mastery of the tools of society-tools that the developing child
can then use, first in social interaction, and later independently
as well. Vygotsky conceived of written language as intimately
related to spoken language, both being socially-situated and
developmentally-continuous processes. The challenge for
teachers, he believed, was to insure that children had a purpose
for reading and writing and that writing was a meaningful ac-
 Erting SLS 75

tivity, "relevant to life" (Vygotsky 1978: 118). Dyson (1990:

21) points out that in this view, written language is not just
speech written down, it is rather a second-order symbol sys-
tem, embedded in and emerging from a complex of developing
symbolic abilities.
How then will we define literacy? Roland Tharp and Ronald
Gallimore, in Rousing Minds to Life, understand literacy as the
"...patterns of language and cognitive development that can
develop through teaching and schooling" (1988: 9). A literate
person, is one "...capable of reading, writing, speaking [i.e.
conversing, CE], computing, reasoning, and manipulating vi-
sual as well as verbal [i.e. linguistic, CE] symbols and con-
cepts." From this perspective, meaningful discourse is both the
"destination and the vehicle" (1988: 93).
As children engage in dialogue with others, they come to re-
alize the functional potential of the various symbol systems
valued in their society (Vygotsky 1978). Developing a complex
symbol system is what becoming literate is all about, and par-
ticipation in a cultural dialogue is at the heart of this process,
since "...symbol systems contain a people's way of organizing
and responding to experience" (Dyson 1990: 19). With these
thoughts in mind-that meaningful discourse, social interac-
tion, and cultural dialogue are essential for the development of
literacy-let's turn again to the reflections of Shanny Mow's
fictional deaf character, Sam:
In group discussions where you alone are deaf, you do not exist.
Because you cannot present your ideas through a medium everyone
is accustomed to, you are not expected, much less asked, to con-
tribute them. Because you are deaf, they turn deaf. (Mow 1976: 6)
And, remembering all of those evenings around the dinner
table with his hearing family:
You never forget that frightening experience....You were left out of
the dinner table conversation. It is called mental isolation. While ev-
eryone istalking or laughing, you are as far away as a lone Arab on
a desert that stretches along every horizon. Everyone and everything
are a mirage; you see them but you cannot touch or become a part
of them. You search for connection. You suffocate inside but you
cannot tell anyone of this horrible feeling. You do not know how to.
You get the impression nobody understands or cares. You have no
Spring 1992 Deafness &Literacy
one to share your childish enthusiasm and curiosity, no sympathetic
listener who can give meaning to your world and the desert around
you ... your parents never learn the sign language or some part of
it.... Instead, the most natural form of expression for you isdismissed
as vulgar. It has never occurred to them that communication is more
than method or talk. That it is a sense of belonging, an exchange of
understanding, a mutual respect for the other's humanity. (1976: 7).
Although Sam is Mow's creation, Sam's story is anything
but fiction. Far too many deaf children and adults can tell that
story of social, linguistic, and cultural isolation as their own. If
we understand literacy to be rooted in social interaction,
meaningful discourse, and cultural dialogue, what are deaf
children to do? What are we, as professionals and parents, to
do? Deaf children, until they are no longer under the care of
their parents, have virtually no choice. But eventually, many of
them discover the deaf community and wonder why the so-
cial interaction, the meaningful discourse, and the cultural dia-
logue they finally experience were denied them for so long.
They wonder, too, why their parents and teachers, who did
have a choice, who could have created visual learning envi-
ronments for them, who could have connected them with their
culture and their history, chose to impose isolation and depri-
vation instead.
One might argue that the picture painted by Mow's character
is dated. Sam would have come through oral programs, since,
in 1976, when these words were published, "Total Communi-
cation" (TC) was just being proposed as an educational
philosophy. It is no doubt true that TC programs have created
more appropriate communication environments for many deaf
children when compared with oral alternatives. We have
pointed out elsewhere that while the TC environment is a
decided improvement, it is far from adequate (Johnson, Liddell,
& Erting 1989). In the paper "Unlocking the Curriculum," we
argued that most TC classrooms are linguistically oral and
auditory, despite the illusion created by the use of what we call
Sign Supported Speech systems. When teachers talk and pro-
duce signs simultaneously, the spoken language dominates. It
is, in fact, the only language in use: the signs function as sup-
ports in the best case, and as visual noise in the worst case; but
 Erting SLS 75

the language of the classroom, spoken English, is still inacces-

sible to the students so taught. The question is not whether
teachers can be taught to produce Sign Supported Speech cor-
rectly and completely (cf. Luetke-Stahlman 1988, Gustason
1989). Rather, the question is: Can such a system-an incom-
plete manual code for a spoken language even when optimally
produced-perform the functions of a natural language in the
classroom?
Certainly we can communicate with deaf children using Sign
Supported Speech, in certain contexts for certain purposes. But
only a natural language, we believe, created through genera-
tions of use by members of a visual culture and so fully avail-
able to deaf children, can function as a first-order, complex
symbol system for them. Social interaction with those more ca-
pable peers and adults Vygotsky recognizes as the real teach-
ers, by means of such a visually complete and accessible lan-
guage, can provide deaf children with the symbolic and cogni-
tive tools they need to learn the second-order symbolic pro-
cesses involved in reading, writing, and engaging in meaning-
ful discourse through English.
Seeing the problem
Our task, then, is to move from a pathological view of the deaf
child-the deficit model-to a view of the child as whole, as a
competent learner but one who requires a visual environment in
order to thrive. This shift raises our expectations for deaf chil-
dren's linguistic, academic, and social performance; for the
problem no longer resides in the child: it resides, rather, in the
environment.
This shift also changes our expectations of ourselves as edu-
cators. We who can hear must learn how to see. Our job is to
go to meet deaf children where they are and where they will
always be-in a visual world-and to bring to them ways of
understanding our world, which takes hearing and speaking so
much for granted. We must make spoken language accessible
to them through print, but by relating it to their way of seeing
and to their way of communicating.
The basic premise here is that teachers and children need to
converse. Tharp and Gallimore state:
Spring 1992 Deafness &Literacy
The task of schooling can be seen as one of creating and support-
ing instructional conversations, among students, teachers, adminis-
trators, program developers, and researchers. It is through instruc-
tional conversation that babies learn to speak, children to read,
teachers, to teach, researchers to discover, and all to become liter-
ate.
The concept itself contains a paradox: "instruction" and "conversa-
tion" appear contrary, the one implying authority and planning, the
other equality and responsiveness. The task of teaching is to resolve
this paradox. To most truly teach, one must converse; to truly con-
verse isto teach. (1988: 111)
The roots of literacy, consequently, lie in dialogue, and the
development of literacy is inseparable from the development of
language (1988: 104). It's origins can be traced back to the
earliest mother-infant interactions, through which infants learn
the structure of dialogue and how to participate with another in
rule governed, meaningful conversation. Bruner, like Vygotsky
and his followers, argues that a child's language develops
through processes of social interaction and becomes the child's
most important tool for cognitive growth. Children are active
and creative learners, but they need to be provided with appro-
priate social interactional frameworks if they are to learn
(Bruner 1977).
Adults provide that framework, finely tuning the interaction
to take account of the abilities of the developing child. In
Bruner's view, the adult aids the child by engaging in pre-
dictable, routinized play formats, continually raising expecta-
tions of the child's performance. It is through these formats that
adults transmit culture to children and teach them how to use
language. Bruner clearly states his view of the relationship of
language and culture:
Culture is constituted of symbolic procedures, concepts, and dis-
tinctions that can only be made in language. It is constituted for the
child in the very act of mastering language. Language, in
consequence, cannot be understood save in its cultural setting.
(1983:134)
We are beginning to understand that the development of
literacy is related to and, in fact, proceeds in tandem with the
development of face-to-face communication competence.
Literacy emerges through the development of complex sym-
 Erting SLS 75

bolic processes that develop concurrently rather than sequen-

tially in both the face-to-face and written language domains. In
this view, the child
...gradually develops as a reader/writer in everyday activity settings.
These settings are varied in terms of activities, participants, pur-
poses, and styles of interaction, including the nature and extent of
child involvement. Literacy events take place in settings that include
domestic chores (the writing and reading of shopping lists, paying
bills, making schedules), entertainment (reading TV guides, rules for
games), school-related tasks (homework, playing school with sib-
lings), work tasks (carryovers from parents' jobs), religious activities
(Sunday-school materials, bible reading), communication (letters,
notes, holiday cards), and storybook time. Such literacy events are
experienced almost always, as social and collaborative enterprises,
with goals embedded in everyday activity settings-only rarely in
family contexts isthe teaching of reading itself a purpose of everyday
literacy events, even after formal schooling commences. (Bruner
1983: 101)
It is important to point out that even when we are consider-
ing the development of literacy for children who conduct face-
to-face interaction in the same language they are reading and
writing (i.e. hearing children acquiring spoken and written
English), the transition from language in everyday interactional
contexts to written language in school is not without problems.
The relationship of spoken to written language needs to be
taught, and, as Tharp and Gallimore suggest, it
...must be taught by bringing everyday concepts into connection with
the system of writing in a context of joint social use. The "system" of
writing is far different from the everyday concepts that have been
learned through practical activity in activity settings of the home and
community. (1988:107).
If this disjunction-between the language of face-to-face
communication and that of print-is problematic for hearing
children, it presents even more of a challenge to deaf children.
With linguistic competence and comfortable teacher-student
interaction in a natural sign language, however, translation
from the domain of everyday concepts to the domain of in-
school concepts becomes possible. Likewise, translation from
one language (sign language) to another (written English) can
be systematic. The lexicon, syntax, and domains of meaning
Spring 1992 Deafness & Literacy

(semantics) of one language can be compared and contrasted

with those of the other. As the child develops competence, in-
structional conversations can take place in sign language about
written English and in written English (through programs such
as ENFI-cf. Batson 1988, Kreeft Payton, 1988) about sign
language. Similarly, meaningful discourse focused on history
(including the history of deaf people), science, literature
(including sign language literature), and mathematics can occur
in instructional conversations in both languages.
From ideas to practice
The ideas presented here in support of teaching a natural sign
language to deaf children as their primary face-to-face lan-
guage and teaching English as a second language through liter-
acy, are not mere theory. They have been implemented, though
not so widely as they should be. Educators in Sweden,
Denmark, Venezuela, and Uruguay have already committed
themselves to such an approach (Bergman & Wallin i.p., de
Lujan i.p., Hansen 1990, Davies 1991). In the US. numerous
researchers and educators have advanced similar ideas
(Kannapell, 1974, 1978, Woodward 1978, Erting 1978, Stevens
1980, Quigley & Paul 1984, Paul 1988, Strong 1988, Supalla
i.p.). Currently, several educational programs in the United
States and Canada are beginning to put some of these princi-
ples into practice. In the process educators are discovering that
moving from theory to practice is challenging, to say the least.
First, there are the deaf children themselves. Deaf children
from deaf signing families come to school proficient in a natu-
ral sign language, but deaf children from hearing families often
come to school with little or no conventional language compe-
tence. While the ultimate educational goals for these children
are the same, the children and thus the teachers begin in very
different places. While the educational process is the same, in
that teacher and child must establish a dialogue, the burden is
on the teacher to discover the linguistic and communicative
system of the child and to begin there.
Next, consider the teachers: only a relatively small percent-
age of teachers are deaf themselves and fluent in sign language.
The vast majority of hearing teachers are not proficient in a
 Erting SLS 75

natural sign language, and much too often they cannot under-
stand the visual-gestural communication of deaf children in
their classes. These conditions obviously do not promote dia-
logue-instructional conversations. Instructional discourse of
the kind we have been advocating is virtually impossible in
these circumstances. When hearing teachers come to the same
realization and seek to enlist the help of deaf people, they often
discover that qualified and interested deaf adults are not avail-
able, or if they are, that bureaucratic barriers prevent them from
being readily incorporated into the educational system.
Planners of educational programs themselves may find that
their current organizational structure is an obstacle to the im-
plementation of a curriculum based upon Vygotskian ideas.
Statistics show that more than one-third of the 45,844 deaf and
hard of hearing students represented in the 1987-88 Annual
Survey of Hearing Impaired Students and Youth attend pro-
grams that enroll between 1 and 10 students (Allen, personal
communication). As Schildroth points out, children who are
mainstreamed are
...scattered in regular local schools for hearing students, where pri-
mary, junior high and senior high schools are very often in different
locations. The communication and socialization limits often resulting
from this isolation and dispersion can have serious effects on the
deaf student's development, especially its emotional and behavioral
aspects. (1988: 65)
Since the hearing children in such schools rarely become
proficient in sign language, these deaf children have no direct
linguistic access to a significant number of peers. Mainstream
programs, we can safely say, place little or no emphasis on a
child's interaction with more capable peers as integral to that
child's linguistic, cognitive, and social-emotional develop-
ment. As for the deaf child's access to meaningful discourse
with the mainstream teacher, even if there is a well-qualified
educational interpreter (and more often than not there is not), it
is difficult to imagine the kind of finely-tuned dialogue advo-
cated by Vygotsky and his followers occurring through an in-
termediary.
Spring 1992 Deafness & Literacy

Focus on the family

Finally, consider the hearing family. What is their role in their
deaf child's life? How can hearing parents and siblings become
proficient signers and incorporate the deaf child into the family
when their first language, their language of everyday discourse,
is a spoken language and when they rarely if ever come into
contact with members of the deaf community? How can hear-
ing parents learn about this visual culture of deaf people and
incorporate both visual and auditory worlds in one family?
We believe that there are answers to these questions and that
they can be discovered if all participants-teachers, parents,
deaf adults-work together, with a common vision, to create
solutions. The deaf community-comprised of people who
share a common visual orientation to the world-is the most
important resource we have, and it remains untapped. Often the
expertise of deaf people, their knowledge of visual culture and
language, their strategies for success in a fundamentally hostile
environment, is not recognized, even by themselves. Deaf and
hearing people together, acknowledging the unique contribu-
tion each can make to the education of deaf children, should
enter into meaningful discourse with each other as part of the
environment we create for our children.
In attempting to understand the very earliest roots of literacy
for deaf children in deaf families, my deaf colleagues and I
have entered into a partnership with ten deaf families. We
agree with other researchers (e.g. Tharp & Gallimore 1988: 94)
that an examination of language teaching and learning in natu-
ral environments of home, community, and culture has much to
teach us much about promoting language acquisition and liter-
acy in school. In addition, we hope to discover strategies we
can teach hearing parents as they attempt to interact with their
child in the visual modality. With these goals in mind, we have
been videotaping interaction in deaf families and have entered
into a sustained dialogue with deaf parents about this early in-
teraction. Our approach is ethnographic and descriptive and our
goal is discovery-discovery of questions as well as answers.
We have recorded deaf parents and their deaf children inter-
acting in a variety of everyday contexts at home, and in a stu-
 Erting SLS 75

dio at Gallaudet, beginning in the first month of life and con-

tinuing through the preschool years. The focus of our first
analysis was the face-to-face interaction of deaf mothers with
their infants under 6 months of age. We found what other re-
search have suggested (Harris et al. 1987, Kantor 1982, Launer
1982, Maestas y Moores 1980)-that deaf signing mothers
modify their visual-gestural communication with their babies in
specific ways to produce a sign language version of
"motherese" (Erting, Prezioso & Hynes 1990, Erting &
Prezioso 1990).
Our findings help us describe how deaf parents finely tune
their interactions with their deaf babies to produce the early
dialogues so characteristic of early mother-infant interaction
(Bruner 1983). Deaf mothers, like hearing mothers, use the
predictable, routinized formats identified by Bruner as playing
an essential role in the communication of language and culture.
These routines, for the deaf child, are characteristically visual
and gestural. We see that, as in most other natural linguistic
communities, deaf parents act as if their infants' behaviors are
meaningful and communicative. The parents accommodate to
the child to transform the infant into a competent interactional
partner. Deaf parents, like the hearing parents that have been
studied by Bruner and others, expend a great deal of effort to
maintain a dialogue, and that dialogue is focused on a meaning-
ful, joint activity. Communication is goal-directed and lan-
guage is learned, but the language teaching per se is not inten-
tional. Deaf children in deaf families, like hearing children in
hearing families, learn language as a means to an end.
We are now beginning to explore the ways in which literacy
emerges for deaf children in deaf families. We want to know
what kinds of literacy events occur in these homes, what they
mean to the parents and children, and how deaf parents help
their children, through instructional conversations, make sense
of written English. We hope to discover how deaf children
make meaning, how they develop symbolic systems through
everyday discourse with their parents and siblings. We want to
be able to describe the nature of those symbolic systems as well
Spring 1992 Deafness & Literacy

as the environmental supports the parents and older siblings

create.
We have a lot to learn and it is a very exciting adventure.
We discovered long ago that deaf-hearing collaboration is the
approach to teaching and researching that makes sense to us. In
our work, deaf and hearing researchers team up with deaf
families, and together we teach each other, together we learn.

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 Erting SLS 75

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Carol J. Erting is Director of the Culture &Communications Studies

Program inthe Gallaudet Research Institute and a Professor in the
Department of Linguistics &Interpreting at Gallaudet University. She
isco-editor, with Virginia Volterra, of From Gesture to Language in
Hearing &Deaf Children (Springer Series in Language & Communi-
cation, Vol. 27) Berlin & NY: Springer-Verlag. 1989. ISBN 3-540-
51328-0.