When deaf or hard of hearing children lack proficiency in sign language, they encounter several disadvantages as they enter school. Therefore, numerous parents are currently advocating for increased American Sign Language (ASL) education within schools across the United States. Studies have demonstrated that children who learn sign language at an early age perform better in various areas, including academic achievement and social interaction, as compared to those who do not possess sign language skills.
Usually, children who are diagnosed with hearing loss receive either hearing aids, cochlear implants, or a combination of both. Hearing aids work to amplify the sound signals reaching the ears and enhance a child's residual hearing capacity, whereas cochlear implants can bypass the ears and directly stimulate the auditory nerve in the brain to produce a sound perception.
In an article featured in the Social Service Review, entitled “Avoiding Linguistic Neglect of Deaf Children”. Within it, the writers, which are mainly Deaf or Hard-of-hearing themselves, point out that this “speech only” technique, which utilizes electronic devices, adversely impacts many deaf children. This prevents them from mastering the language during their formative years, which is a crucial time for learning. This can result in an incomplete development of the brain, leading to permanent harm to one's intellectual and social skills. An optimal approach would be for parents to commence sign language instruction for their deaf children at the earliest opportunity.
Challenges to Widening Entry to ASL Education
Numerous parents of Deaf/Hard of Hearing children discover that their local area lacks the resources needed to adequately teach ASL. When the parents seek advice from educators on how their Deaf or Hard-of-hearing child can be helped, they become frustrated. There is a need for more dialogue concerning communication, access, language acquisition, and the different choices available to parents.Local school districts generally have no services for Deaf/HoH students. Consequently, it is vitally important to expand the opportunities for these children and their ability to access language learning.
Social workers can take the following steps to tackle the problem of insufficient ASL education in their communities:
- work diligently to educate themselves about the issue
- take steps to educate the public about ASL education, and...
- support high standards of ASL learning for Deaf/HoH children.
Other Options for Expanding the Awareness and Application of ASL Education
Here are extra methods to expanding ASL learning via the communications media, government, and educational systems.Enable ASL to fulfill foreign language requirements in educational institutions
Supplying ASL to meet a foreign language requirement is really a practical option for a lot of students. That is because ASL is the main language of roughly one-quarter to half a million individuals in the US. Offering ASL as a foreign language option can even lead to far better child care for Deaf and Hard-of-hearing children. It will tremendously facilitate connections between the D/HoH and hearing communities when ASL is known and used by lots of individuals.Build more online learning resources to make ASL available for everybody
At the start of 2023, as many as 5.16 billion individuals globally were using the web. This number comes to 64.4% of the global population. Thus, raising the quantity and availability of online ASL academic resources which include Start ASL can tremendously broaden public access to and acquisition of the language.Strategy to get more government legislation that facilitates ASL learning
Advertising campaigns such as Language Equality and Acquisition for Deaf Kids (LEAD-K) are extremely impactful in broadening ASL education. LEAD-K is a nationwide legislative campaign. It calls for states to place ASL learning to be equal with English learning so that D/HoH kids have a very robust language foundation as they start school. Additionally, it requires states to make sure that D/HoH children are at age-appropriate learning levels once they reach kindergarten.The approaches described above can go a long way toward delivering better access to ASL education. If you would like to take action and help support projects promoting increased access to ASL learning, have a look at LEAD-K as well as other similar efforts in your community and around the nation. You can also get started in learning ASL online to be part of the increasing American Sign Language family.