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5:4 Wednesday, April 30, 2003
What’s
All This Talk About Literacy?
A New Guide for Parents of Deaf or Hard of
Hearing Children
According to the National Institute for Literacy, forty-four million
Americans age sixteen and older have the lowest literacy skills (level 1) and
have significant literacy needs; forty-three percent of people with the lowest
literacy skills live in poverty; seventy percent of people with the lowest
literacy skills have no full- or part-time job; workers lacking a high school
diploma earn $452 per month compared to $1,829 for college graduates; and eight
million people (4 percent of the total adult population) were unable to perform
even the simplest literacy tasks.
Literacy and Your Deaf Child provides parents with the means to ensure
that their deaf or hard of hearing child becomes a proficient reader and writer
and develops overall literacy skills that will enable him to function in an
increasingly print-oriented world. In chapter one of Literacy and
Your Deaf Child, authors David A. Stewart and Bryan R. Clarke define
literacy, stating: “For many people, literacy means the ability to communicate,
to read and write, to calculate and, with the advent of cyberspace, use a
computer. The latter is made evident by the recently invented term
computer-literate.”
This new guide begins by introducing some common concepts, among them the
importance of parental involvement in a deaf child’s education. It outlines how
children acquire language and describes the auditory and visual links to
literacy. With this information parents can make informed decisions regarding
hearing aids, cochlear implants, speechreading, and sign communication, all of
which can have a marked influence on their child’s language development. Read chapter eight,
Writing, and
order Literacy and Your Deaf Child at a special savings of 20% off
the regular price.
 Studies
in Second Language Acquisition features a ringing endorsement of Clayton
Valli and Ceil Lucas’s
Linguistics of American Sign Language: An Introduction in its March 2003
issue: “This volume is
unrivaled among linguistic works on American Sign Language. Most of the
published work on American Sign Language is either in the form of textbooks (of
varying quality) or highly technical linguistic research that is often
inaccessible to the general reader, even one whose signing skills may be quite
good. This work is different in that it provides a solid linguistic foundation
for the study of American Sign Language, coupled with an up-to-date analysis of
what we know about the structures an operations of American Sign Language. It
also provides in a single place an invaluable collection of major articles in the
linguistics of American Sign Language.” Read the
full review,
and order
Linguistics of American Sign Language.
 Historians,
geneticists, and representatives of the disability community gathered at the
Gallaudet University Kellogg Conference Center on April 2-4, 2003 to participate
in the Genetics, Disability and Deafness International Conference, sponsored by
the Gallaudet University Press Institute. Louis Menand, author of the
Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Metaphysical Club, kicked off the
conference with his presentation “The Science of Human Nature and the Human
Nature of Science.” Menand, Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York, appeared through support from the
Schaefer Endowment Fund. He was joined in setting the conference’s
intellectually stimulating tone by two other keynote speakers, Alan Guttmacher,
Deputy Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who announced
that the human mapping project was only 11 days from completion, and Michael
Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State
University, who explored “Disability, Democracy, and the New Genetics.”
John Schuchman, Professor Emeritus of History at Gallaudet University discussed
deafness and eugenics in the Nazi era, and Walter Nance, Professor of Genetics
at Virginia Commonwealth University, provided an introduction to genetic studies
of deafness during the past 100 years. Other renowned presenters eloquently
addressed social accommodation and disability, basic concepts of heredity,
deafness in a Bedouin community, informed consent, bioethics and studies of
attitudes of deaf adults towards genetics, and genetic. These invigorating
presentations spurred sharp debate in the audience, which represented a broad
mix of backgrounds and countries. The conference culminated in lively, moving
accounts of personal and professional experiences with genetic counseling from a
panel of deaf individuals, capped off by an inspiring summary from Irene Leigh,
Professor of Psychology at Gallaudet. The Genetics, Disability, and Deafness
International Conference explored issues that will be debated by historians,
geneticists, ethicists, and disability-rights advocates for as long as the
genetics revolution continues to have an impact on hereditary deafness.
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