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BEVERLY: Hi, and welcome back.
This is segment 2 of part 1, and we ended the last segment
with asking the question how do you get there from here?
CONNIE: And how do you get there from here whether you're a hearing baby,
a baby with a hearing aid, or a baby with a cochlear implant.
And where is "there"?
"There" is age-appropriate literacy development.
BEVERLY: So before we get started in talking about how you get there
and the steps along the way or the mile markers along the way,
we just wanted to be clear of where we're coming from,
what kind of is the foundation of the work that we do.
And while there's all different types of literacy -
we can talk about media literacy and sign language literacy -
we want to be clear that the literacy that we're talking about
in our lecture series is text-based literacy,
it's learning to read and write a standard form of English.
So that's an important consideration as we move through.
CONNIE: Particularly in our field where there's lots of discussion
about bilingualism and two languages, we just want to be really clear
for the audience that we do believe
that natural sign languages are legitimate languages
just as spoken languages are.
So English and Auslan both are legitimate,
absolutely recognised languages, but then in this presentation our focus
is on developing reading and writing skills in English.
BEVERLY: And also just the understanding
that a lot of the natural sign languages, or all the natural sign languages,
don't have a written form, so that is not what we're referring to,
we're talking about English text, English literacy, in this presentation.
Further, we also think it's important that you understand that we come from
the thinking that the literacy development for deaf and hard of hearing students
is the same, it's always along the same path, it's not different.
This has sometimes been called a developmentally similar hypothesis
or a qualitative similarity hypothesis, that the things that a deaf child
needs to learn to become a reader and writer
are the same as those that hearing children need to learn.
CONNIE: So in other words the foundational requisites,
what you need to know and understand and do and have skills around,
don't differ because of your audiogram.
They are a static set of foundations that are required
irrespective of hearing loss,
and so they apply to both hearing and deaf learners.
BEVERLY: We also think it's really important that you understand where
we're coming from in terms of our thinking about literacy development.
We believe that the literacy development of deaf children should be viewed
in the same way as hearing children.
So they need to follow the same path.
The path is the same regardless of the hearing loss.
This has been coined either a developmentally similar hypothesis
or a qualitative similarity hypothesis, which is just recognising
there's not a different way that deaf children learn to read or write.
CONNIE: In other words, the foundational skills,
the requisites you need to become a reader and writer,
don't change because of your audiogram.
Hearing and deaf children need to be able to do and understand
and have the same set of skills to move along that path
whether or not they have a hearing loss,
whether they're hearing, whether they're deaf.
Sometimes we use the metaphor of something like playing tennis.
If you think about playing tennis as an activity which I know
is a big one in Australia, playing tennis involves one
being able to do a certain set of things.
That'*** the ball, whatever.
I don't play tennis very well and really I'm actually awful at it.
My son is actually very good and he gets very frustrated with me
when I'm trying to play.
I cannot get a handle on those foundational skills and requisites,
the point being those don't change because one is tall, short, fat, thin,
old, young, or maybe has more or less natural ability in sport,
playing tennis requires one to do a certain set of things.
So our argument is that that set of things you need to do
to become a reader and writer doesn't change.
The activity is the same, it's the learner who might be different.
So we need to differentiate and take that into account and provide ways
for learners who are different to do the same things perhaps in a different way
but not on a different path.
BEVERLY: And I think that throughout the lecture series
that's what we focus on, we focus on
how do you differentiate the instruction, how do you differentiate the activity,
so that the deaf child can be successful with the activity.
So where do we start?
What are the starting places?
CONNIE: Well, the big shout-out here, the starting place is language,
language is what sits under the whole business.
And I know this is going to sound kind of very grand,
but we like to call it almost the miracle of language acquisition
because of all the human accomplishments,
the one that we think is the most outstanding is the fact that
most children most of the time acquire
the language that they land in when they're born.
And when you think about the challenge of acquiring a second language,
think about learning Russian and you think oh, my lord,
what that involves.
Yet every single baby that arrives on this planet
manages to acquire the language that they were born into
seemingly in an effortless fashion.
It's such a miracle that 80% of the language fundamentals
are acquired by children by age 3.
So think about how that harkens back to that early start.
Now we've found our deaf babies earlier so we can take advantage
of that time from zero to three.
By age 5, children have a receptive vocabulary of between 20,000 and 40,000 words -
that's a lot of words -
and an expressive vocabulary of between 3,000 and 5,000,
and some of them in more than one language, in fact,
many children in more than one language.
And the miracle of this is that this incredible accomplishment all happens
if the right conditions are in place, and what are those conditions?
Well, these are these four language conditions we referred to
at the very beginning when we said we're going to make a lot of noise
about these four language acquisition conditions,
and they're these:
exposure in quality and quantity to an accessible language
while engaged in meaningful activity with capable users of the language.
Now, let's unpack that a little bit.
What this really means is you acquire the language when you land.
Baby lands, "hi baby".
Baby is born, "hello baby".
Does baby speak the language?
No.
Baby knows nothing at this point.
How does baby acquire the language, what do we do with baby
immediately when baby arrives?
BEVERLY: We talk.
CONNIE: We talk to baby.
We talk to baby, and if we're deaf parents,
we may sign to baby.
Does baby know how to talk or sign yet?
No.
But in the faith that we know somehow this miracle will happen that
if we just continue to expose this baby to lots of rich language while -
is it lessons, do we sit and have a school book,
an exercise book that we follow?
No.
We engage this baby in activities, in meaningful interaction,
things that matter to baby,
and we mediate those activities with language.
The world goes through language for babies.
And the other condition is around that baby have to be
at least a few other folks who are already
capable users of this language so they can make this happen.
You'll notice the second condition says to an accessible language.
We normally don't pay much attention to that for hearing children
because it's kind of taken as read.
A baby is born into a family, whether it's Italy or Russia
or China or Australia, and they arrive in a family
who speaks English or speaks Urdu, or speaks Russian and they hear
and the language is accessible, and so we don't give it much thought.
But for deaf babies, they're in that unusual situation
of landing often in an environment where the language around them
is a spoken language
and by virtue of their hearing loss they don't have access to it.
So the language acquisition condition that gets thwarted for them is access.
And this is the critical piece.
Whenever you can't put a tick beside one of those conditions,
the process is interfered with,
and when you put a question mark beside accessibility,
the language acquisition process is interfered with hugely.
And in the past that path was interfered with
because we didn't have hearing technologies -
hence the headphones on the baby -
to provide them with access to the spoken language
that was around them.
So we know, and there's a huge literature in our field
about the fact that many deaf babies did not develop language from birth
in a way that paralleled that of their hearing-age peers.
And the argument we're going to make here is without that language foundation
you can't move on to literacy because we're suggesting
that language underpins the development of literacy.
Without the language of the text, you can't learn to read and write it.
We don't have time to get into this too much in this presentation,
we'll provide you with some references for bilingualism
and the relationships between sign languages and print.
But if you take a look at these examples and we pose the question -
how does language underpin the development of literacy.
Take a look at those three examples underneath
and they all say the same thing.
What's the first one, what language is that?
BEVERLY: I think it's French.
CONNIE: That's right, Beverly, that's French,
and from a bilingual country - actually we say
we're a bilingual country - most of us don't speak French very well.
But if you take a look at that, can you read that sentence
if you don't speak French?
BEVERLY: I could read it.
I'm not sure I would read it properly, but I could read it.
CONNIE: Could you pick out the word literacy?
BEVERLY: Yes, and language.
CONNIE: And language.
Because those languages are close enough,
you can unpick it a bit, but you really can't read it
without the language that sits underneath it.
Can you read the next one?
BEVERLY: No, that one is in Japanese.
CONNIE: Nor can I.
So because it's written in a script that we can't read
and we don't know the language, it's impossible for us to make sense of it.
And the third example is in?
BEVERLY: I think it's German.
CONNIE: Mmm-hmm.
And can you read that one?
BEVERLY: I can't.
CONNIE: Now, I can because I grew up speaking German,
but the point is really kind of a simple way to make the point, however,
that you can't read a language if you don't have the language
that sits underneath it, so that language that supports literacy,
and we make this point only because in deaf education, of all of the fields
that I'm aware of, we kind of make the argument that
you can have one language here that's completely different
than the language of the text and somehow put the two of them together
and come up with literacy, not the focus
that we would be putting out in this presentation.
So in other words what we're suggesting with our little graphic - and trust me,
we had trouble trying to figure out how to make a pretty graphic -
but the point being is that language holds up reading and writing,
but that the language that holds up reading and writing
has to be the same language that it's written in.
And I know that's kind of an awkward sentence, but the point is
that in deaf education we have sometimes argued
that Auslan can hold up reading and writing
and our suggestion is that's actually not the way that it works.
It has to be English that holds up literacy in English.
And if Auslan were holding up reading and writing,
it would be holding up reading and writing in Auslan,
but as Beverly mentioned earlier, there is no script for Auslan,
so there is no print language for it to support.
So in other words, our key point here is before we can
even begin to talk about early literacy development,
we have to go back and think about
early language development and language acquisition.
BEVERLY: And Connie's work has focused a lot more on that area of language,
whereas mine has focused more on phonology and print-based,
and we always joke if we were doing like
an arm wrestle between phonology and language who would win.
She would win, so I don't even go there with that.
But what we do know about, as she was saying,
the language underpinning literacy and how that's so important
for later for print is because the language underpins literacy
at all the different levels.
So the sub-lexical level, sub-lexical meaning smaller than words,
so that phonology that I focus a lot of my attention on; the lexical level,
which is at the word level, language is important
at that level as well; and then the syntactic level
or the sentence level.
Language is important at all of these levels and it needs to be the language
that you're going to later read and white.
CONNIE: And I think something that's counterintuitive,
at least it's counterintuitive to the students that I teach at the uni,
we think about reading and writing as visual
because I can hold up a piece of paper and here's the script
and I can see it, but here's the rub.
Reading and writing are not visual processes,
they're auditory processes, and that seems counterintuitive,
but this is what we know from hearing children.
Hearing children who have reading disabilities are
far more impaired in phonological processing
than they are in orthographic or print processing.
It's not about not being able to see it correctly,
it's about not being able to hear it correctly.
So if you start to think about learning to read and write,
being more dependent on ears than eyes, it makes sense that
children with hearing loss may have struggles with developing literacy.
BEVERLY: And at those beginning stages of learning to read and write,
which is the focus of our series of presentations,
it's also that blind children don't have problems with that process because
it is more about listening than it is about seeing in these early stages.
CONNIE: And in this move from language to print,
there's a way in which children need to figure out how they connect
the language they already have, the language they already own,
to the print on the page, and they make those connections,
as we said, at several levels.
BEVERLY: The first would be the sub-lexical level.
Sub-lexical is smaller than words.
So the example we have here is within the word "mother".
What's the first sound in the word "mother"?
"M" - the "m" sound takes us to the sub-lexical level.
Us saying "m", we're saying it in English,
it's the language that we're later going to be reading and writing.
We also go to the lexical level.
Lexical is the word level.
And we also bring in meaning here, so this is where
we're not only reading the word, but we also are understanding
the meaning of it - so, for example, what is the meaning of mother,
what is a mother - and then that moves to the syntactic level.
CONNIE: And interesting, the syntactic level also has an auditory
memory component because you need to remember or
be able to hold in your auditory memory the order in which the words go.
So, for example, back to the word "mother",
"my mother came to meet me at the station",
versus saying "these teachers tend to mother their students ".
So you can see how there are many levels at which a student has to have
control of the language to make that connection between language and print.
BEVERLY: And what is one of the connectors?
One of the connectors is phonology.
Phonology serves as a connector.
And even before we're working with print with children,
which usually happens around the kindergarten age,
we are working with phonology
and really looking at phonology from a through-the-air perspective,
so it's manipulating sounds within the language,
words within the language, rhyming, things such as that,
without print, but it forms an important foundation
to make this connection later.
CONNIE: And probably one of the key things that we want to underscore
for somebody working with parents here
is this isn't about any print at this stage.
So much of this early work is through the air and just through listening back
again to the primacy of the ear and the auditory aspect of learning
to read and write.
BEVERLY: We also know that children
develop their phonological skills in stages.
We usually start with larger pieces of language, such as words.
Then we can move to syllables, to onsets and rhymes,
and then finally to the phonemes.
When we're setting up kids for reading and writing,
they really need to get down to that phoneme level
or that sub-lexical level.
It's interesting when you look at the research,
in English-speaking countries
there seems to be a real stable trajectory of development.
So, for example, it's very limited in 2- and 3-year-old children,
but then it quickly develops in 3-year-olds
to about the age of 5 and then it's a very secure skill,
it's called a constrained skill, like once you have it, you have it,
and it's pretty secure by age 6, which is the perfect timing
to beginning reading instruction.
And the most important aspect of phonology when we step
into reading instruction is a skill called phonemic awareness.
We like Torgersen's description of this where he describes phonemic awareness
is a conceptual understanding of language that behaves like a skill.
So it is something that some children just get,
they just get that words rhyme,
we don't have to teach them that words rhyme,
they just intuitively understand that.
But it also behaves like a skill.
So children who are having difficulty with that,
we can actually teach it.
Two very important skills in this area of phonemic awareness
for reading and writing is blending.
That's what you use for reading, blending sounds to form words, m-a-n,
putting those sounds together, that's how we read words
or decode words, whereas the opposite, segmenting,
is more associated with writing or encoding,
so taking a word like "man" and breaking it into its parts,
m-a-n, in order to write down the letters that correspond
with those sounds.
So that's where we're heading with phonemic awareness
and how it relates to both reading and writing.
CONNIE: And because I'm a writing person,
I always find that using children's writing samples is the best shout-out
for explaining what we're really talking about here.
So we've used the phrase "talking their way into text",
children using their language to get into text
or make the relationship to text.
So in this example done by a 6--year-old - and I'm not going to tell you
whether this child was deaf or hearing - you can see in this example she writes:
"I have a cat Abby he is cute and" - can you read that word, "cuddly" -
"he likes It outsiDe".
And then look at this example - I'm not going to tell you whether this
child is hearing or deaf - she's 7.
She writes: "My cat is white.
She is flofe [fluffy] too.
Her nose is soft and pink.
She has a bow.
Her wiskrs are long.
She is pretty I think."
If you can't guess, this child was hearing,
this child is deaf with a cochlear implant.
You wouldn't be able to tell the difference -
age-appropriate commensurate outcome.
What we really want you to take note of here is how did the child get there,
what does the child have control of to talk their way into text?
At the syntactic level, she can already say
what it is she's going to write.
So you can't write something you can't say.
So she can already say "my cat is white".
She already knows at the lexical level the words, like cat,
but she also has an understanding of the sub-lexical
level, the phonemic awareness, to write the word fluffy F-L-O-F-E
because that's how it sounds, and we'll talk a bit more about that
about English is not very regular in its sound-symbol relationships,
so "flofe", F-L-O-F-E, is a very good go at writing the word fluffy.
Our challenge in the past is signing your way into text
doesn't necessarily get you to the same place.
As Beverly mentioned before, these children can have equally good ideas.
What they're lacking is that language that sits under literacy.
And this is probably the best example to show you how
if you don't have the language that sits under literacy, you face a challenge.
So this student is trying to write "I see the punk girl.
She has long hair.
It is yellow, green, purple, and orange."
When I sat and talked with her about that piece of writing,
I said, "I see the word K-I-S-S" - that's my American finger spelling,
K-I-S-S, you'll see it at the end of the second line -
and I said, "But your story, there's no kissing."
She said, " Of course, no, they're not kissing in my story."
And I asked her what word that was and she said it's this word.
It's the word "punk" because "punk" starts with this hand shape and
the only word that she knows that it should really be a P,
she thinks it's a K, so the word that she knows
that she can spell that starts with a K is kiss,
so that's what she put there.
So you can see the challenge here, it's not that she doesn't have an idea,
she doesn't have the English that sits underneath the literacy,
and her guess is a good one to use the initial from the beginning of the sign
because further down, if you see in the second to last line,
you can see the word "yellow" is signed
with the hand shape Y for yellow.
So she made a logical guess, but not the appropriate guess
given the limitations of her English.
And in this example the same kind of thing occurs.
And I'll just point out one example of where this child
is trying to do the same thing,
to try to put a square peg in a round hole.
She's signing this in ASL, shes' trying to write it in English,
so when she gets to the second line, the second from the bottom line,
you'll see the word C-I-E-S, that's how she's trying to spell "drink",
because drink in ASL is done with a C hand shape,
so she thinks the word drink starts with a C. So the point we're trying to
make here is it's impossible to write in English if you don't have
the English language that sits underneath the literacy.
So in other words, to learn to read and write any script
is to find those aspects of one's linguistic structure
that can be mapped on to that script.
So in other words, what you're doing in your face-to-face language,
which in our case is spoken English,
you have to figure out how that spoken English,
which you already have - remember how much of it you have by age 3,
how you make sense of it in terms of those squiggles on the page,
and there is a systematic way that they line up and you discover
those in your early literacy learning years.
And as children discover this relationship,
this systematic relationship between talk and text,
as they learn more about text, it informs their understanding
of their spoken language.
So often the example that we use is the alphabet song.
Before they learn to use script, children sing the alphabet song,
"A, B, C, D, E, F, G", and many children think "L, M, N, O" is a word,
until you write the alphabet down and you point at it and they go,
"Oh, hang on, L, M, N, O, they're letters".
And we'll show you some examples later of kids writing
where they don't hear words like "I don't know" -
is "I don't know" one word or three words -
that once you start to write, text lets you think about
your spoken language in a different and a new way.
BEVERLY: So our key point to kind of take away from this first lecture
is that language is critical.
I think that we can't underscore that enough,
that literacy depends on language and it's the critical foundation
for moving forward in both reading and writing.
And it's very unique among these precursor abilities.
As I said earlier, phonology is kind of a constrained skill - you learn it,
you know it, you can kind of move on.
With language you're always acquiring new language,
you're always being exposed to new language,
and it's really pervasive throughout the literacy learning process.
CONNIE: So even though we've made a big noise about being hugely important
in the early years, language continues
to be important always, to the end of your life really,
in terms of how language impacts your understanding.
And to end, the implications for deaf children then
and for what we do, literacy development
is inexorably linked to language proficiency and attempting to teach children
to read and write in the absence of a threshold level of language competence
can be a pretty futile and frustrating endeavour.
And speaking as a teacher of the deaf, it's one we've engaged in in the past
and I think what we want to move forward now is an understanding
in this new context how this endeavour can be
less futile and frustrating in the current context.
BEVERLY: And that's where we'll be taking you through along this path as
we go through our series, is how you make it less of a bumpy path
in getting to what ultimately we want, which is age-appropriate
reading and writing abilities.
CONNIE: And so we look forward to chatting with you
in our next presentation where we're actually going to focus
on a key element of the language acquisition conditions accessibility,
which we think is key to an early literacy program.
BEVERLY: Thank you.