One of the least recognised impacts of pre-lingual and early life deafness is how significantly it affects English literacy levels. This is because the wider community does not wholly understand the impact of early life deafness.
From the moment of birth, and even before, a hearing child is listening to and absorbing language. Hearing children are constantly surrounded by language from parents, TV, radio, etc. They learn much of their language and their knowledge of the world both by interacting using their developing language as well as in an unconscious and unstructured way through overhearing what goes on around them. They learn to speak as a direct result of the language that they hear.
Understanding this point is vital in understanding how a hearing child and a child with a hearing loss differ. Speech is the articulation of sounds. Language is the meaning that is encoded in the sounds. For a child with a hearing loss, the biggest challenge they face is the acquisition of language.
To develop English literacy, obviously it is necessary to develop English language first. Most linguists agree that human beings are “pre-programmed” to develop language, in our case English, and that if a child is exposed to a full and complete language during the early years of their life, they will develop that language effortlessly. If this exposure either does not occur or is limited or incomplete, as is commonly the case for children with a significant hearing loss, then English language acquisition will not be attained without considerable effort and additional intervention.
Without fully developed English language, it is a nearly insurmountable task to attain reading and writing skills in English. Without day-to-day access to English language in use, the challenge to develop English literacy is enormous and for many deaf people, a life long challenge. Few achieve native-like usage; many achieve sufficient literacy skills to successfully interact in the world; some are unable to attain literacy skills beyond an early primary level. None of this is a reflection of the deaf person’s intelligence or ability to learn. Rather, it is an indication of how difficult a task it is to learn the written form of a language when a person has little or no access to its spoken form.
It is also important to note here that different skills are required in order to read and to write. These two skills are often taken together as being one and the same. They are not. It is possible for someone to be able to accurately extract the meaning from a grammatically correct English sentence, yet be unable to produce a grammatically correct sentence of his or her own.
For many deaf people, their English vocabulary is well developed, but their grasp of the grammar and syntax of English is only poor to average. As well, they may struggle with the use of idiomatic English. For a large number of deaf people, it is possible to indicate what each word in a sentence is, but be unable to put that information together to clearly indicate the meaning of a sentence.
