BEWARE of the “Critical Language Period” Defense

At a D/HH conference this week, speakers were discussing the “Critical Language Development Period” during which language appears to develop naturally and with little effort by the child or family. To illustrate the urgency of capitalizing on this developmental period, the presenters included a dramatic graphic of a digital alarm clock. In bold red letters, the display on the clock blared: TOO LATE.

My hackles went up immediately. Too often I have heard professionals in Deaf Ed use the “critical period” as a reason for LOWERING EXPECTATIONS and DECREASING SERVICES for students who have passed whatever age is considered to be “the End” of that precious “Period”.  Consider an 8-year old child whose family chose for her to learn spoken language. The child’s teacher asks the SLP why there are no specific articulation or syntax goals in the IEP, and the SLP said, “She has passed the critical language period.”

NO!

These students have entered a “Period” in which they need MORE SERVICES and they need families and professionals to WORK HARDER, not give up. LANGUAGE practice is now more CRITICAL. PERIOD.

If a family has chosen spoken language for their child’s communication, I can offer guidance, options and research. But I cannot ignore the family’s choice. Period. My obligation is to do my best to provide that child with the best possible outcome, given the choice made by the family.

Because, maybe, regardless of what the research says, and what the theories propose, it really is true that “When you’ve seen one deaf child, you’ve seen one deaf child.”

power-walk

Why You Should Consider “I Don’t Know” as a Helpful Answer

I recently rewatched Rick Lavoie’s F.A.T. City video. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you watch it — on a regular basis.

Among numerous bits of teaching wisdom he imparts, Lavoie advises teachers not to accept “I don’t know” as an answer because it gives students permission not to answer.

With respect to Mr. Lavoie, I haven’t noticed that effect in my classes over the years. At some point, I learned that “I don’t know” can be helpful to the teacher.

daffy-shrug

Teacher Challenge: Processing Time

One of the challenges of students who are deaf, using spoken language, is the need for more time to process language, including a teacher’s questions. Here’s a common exchange between teacher and student.

  1. Teacher asks a question.
  2. Teacher waits for student to respond.
  3. Teacher continues to wait, allowing extra time for student to process the question.
  4. Ultra-patient teacher restates the question and waits again.

This interaction can feel a lot like a game of chicken: each person waiting for the other to end the suspense.  It often ends with the student giving an incorrect answer and feeling defeated.

 

idkIf, after truly ‘looking for’ an answer,  students are allowed to respond with “I don’t know,” then the teacher can choose how to proceed with less and frustration and less time lost.

How do you feel about “I don’t know,” as a student response? 

P.S. Here is a link to the Rick Lavoie F.A.T. City video.

 

An Emergency Case of Catch-Up

With high quality support, students who are deaf can learn to use spoken language to communicate with anyone they choose.

That is the basis of this blog.

I think now I should be more specific and add: even with later-than ideal intervention.

For many reasons, some children who are deaf don’t come to receive support in learning spoken language until they are school-aged. These children are suffering from an emergency case of catch-up. So much language and vocabulary to learn and so many years lost.

1-case-of-catch-up

 


Meh. Forgive the bad visual pun.
I didn’t want to say ‘game’ of catch-up. It’s much too serious a topic for the flippant use of that term.

 

 

In my experience, children who begin a quality spoken language program at 11 years old can acquire language and speech that allows them to be successful communicators.

I believe this with all my heart –because I have seen it. And many others have witnessed these victories.

Yes, it’s true that not all children can make that achievement with a late start. But many can. And doesn’t that child – and that family –  in front of you deserve the chance to thrive?

There are so many topics on my “To Write” list. But this one is crying out to be aired. I am working on a series I’m calling Belated Intervention to discuss how these children can be supported and perhaps to highlight those who have succeeded.

Do Deaf Kids Need to Hear Their Classmates Comments?

You are guiding a discussion about the results of a science experiment investigating the effects of gravity on the growth of plant roots. In all cases, the roots of the seeds grew downward. Students are offering responses about why this might have happened.

The student in your class who is deaf hears you (through the FM) pose the question. “What are some reasons the roots might be growing downward?”

“The oo ahh  -ooee  or a oa ee a,” she hears one student suggest.

Another student answers, and she hears something like “a i something something something ou.”


It happens. Several times every day. I’ve experienced it.

I have observed students who are deaf participating in general education classes. They probably hear the teacher rather well. The teacher uses an FM and instinctively uses a louder-than-usual voice when addressing the class.

But students don’t use a louder voice. Many, many times, students use a softer-than-usual voice when speaking out in class. Sitting at the perimeter of the room,  I couldn’t understand what students said at this volume. I highly doubt that the student who is deaf understood them either.

passthemic

Students should use the FM microphone so the D/HH student has access to their answers, questions and comments.

Best Practices: Pass the FM microphone for student questions and comments.

When teachers develop the habit of sharing the FM microphone with students, the student who is D/HH has access to ALL spoken language in the classroom.

It may seem awkward at first, but it can quickly become a classroom expectation. When a soundfield FM is used, all students benefit from access to the shared microphone.

Ask your educational audiologist about the availability of a pass-around mic, which limits the noise associated with handling the mic. 

Repeating  student comments and questions can benefit many students.

Teachers are modeling good public speaking  skills when they repeat the comments and questions of ‘the audience.’ Teach this as a leadership skill and you will be contributing to the development of our next generation of audience-conscious speakers.

Other Strategies

Discuss with the D/HH student how he can let you know he didn’t hear or understand.

Self advocacy is an important skill for all learners and community members. In school, we learn to function as part of a cooperative group, but also need to advocate for our individual needs.

Students who are deaf need to know their own needs regarding communication and language. They also need to be aware of what the general public knows about their needs (answer: very little). They need to have specific language for explaining their needs. And the criteria for having those needs met.

Post prompts on the student’s desk.

 Could you repeat that, please?

I didn’t understand the question. 

Consider a private signal for students who can’t be encouraged to speak up. The signal will remind you to repeat what was just said.


Just like all students have the right to access the building where education takes place; so all students have the right to access all the information being presented. The student who is deaf or hard of hearing needs to know what classmates are contributing in addition to the teacher’s communication. 

The Power of Experience Stories

(Note: If you’re already sold on Experience Stories, watch for suggestions for using them to practice language, vocabulary, auditory skills, reading and more. Coming Soon!)

ziploc-book

 

Experience stories are a fun and easy way to practice language. They can be created and enjoyed both at home and school and are helpful for any child with language goals. 

 

WHAT IS AN EXPERIENCE STORY?  An experience story begins as an activity that an adult shares with a child. After the activity, a story is created, targeting language that the child needs to practice. The story includes photos taken during the activity and the child is the main character. It is read together often, providing repeated practice with the target language.

The benefits of these personalized books are many.

  • The adult can control the language and vocabulary that is used, or wait and see what the child attempts to say during the activity.

If the child needs repetitive, structured practice with language, experience stories can be a fun and motivating way to accomplish that. The parent, teacher or therapist can also use experience stories to expand the child’s language if the child has complex language or learns language more naturally .

  • A single language target can be practiced many times.

    Here are some examples for a Banana Split Experience Story targeting noun-preposition-noun. New vocabulary is in italics.

    The bananas were in the pantry. Anna put the bananas on the counter. The ice cream was in the freezer. Mom put the ice cream on the counter too. Anna put the banana in the bowl. Then mom put three scoops in the bowl. Anna squeezed chocolate on one scoop.Then Anna poured strawberry on scoop. Anna poured pineapple on the last scoop. Mom sprayed whipped cream in Anna’s mouth! Yum! Mom put whipped cream on three scoops. Anna put cherries on three scoops. Anna and mom made a banana split in the kitchen!

    banana-split

  • All verb tenses can be practiced around a single activity.

    Involving the child in planning the activity (making a shopping list, etc.) allows you to use future tense to talk about the activity. Present tense is used during the activity. Past tense is used in the book.

  • The child can practice the same lesson over and over without losing interest.

  • The book created after the experience can be enjoyed for months, and becomes a keepsake documenting the child’s language growth.

  • By sharing the book with extended family, babysitters and others, caregivers can carry the learning over into their time with the child.

  • The text in the book promotes literacy. The child is reading about an activity she participated in, so she is likely to have a better comprehension of what she reads than if it were a commercial book.

  • The book can be used to practice listening and auditory comprehension. The adult says a sentence from the book and the child finds the picture.

  • The book can be used to practice pronoun use. When reading, the reader replaces her own name with ‘I’. If reading with the activity partner, she replaces the partner’s name with ‘you’ etc.

A Thought about Language During the Experience

It’s important that the Experience itself is fun, motivating and natural as possible.

It is not at all natural, while pouring pineapple, to say, “I am pouring pineapple on the last scoop.” But what if Grandma is on speaker phone, participating in the activity from afar? The child can give a play by play . Or the activity can become a cooking show. Mom is the host and asks, “So, Miss Anna Banana, please tell us what you are doing with the pineapple.”  Dad could be in the living room and, on cue ask, “Anna, what’s happening now?” Be creative. Mix it up. Above all, keep it fun.

Language and Deafness: Language vs. Speech

In IQ and Deafness  I discussed the assumptions about someone’s intelligence that we make  based on a person’s speech and language. I named four characteristics that can lead others to misjudge someone’s intelligence.

One of these characteristics is imperfect speech, discussed in Speech and Deafness.

Another effect of deafness that can cause us to make incorrect assumptions is imperfect language.

I will use 2 posts to discuss why those who are deaf sometimes have irregular language. You may also want to read the short post HOW DID YOU LEARN LANGUAGE?

Language & Deafness 1: LANGUAGE vs. SPEECH (this post)

Language & Deafness 2: WHY IS LANGUGAGE DIFFICULT FOR D/HH Students?

cropped-cropped-cropped-word-cloud-again1.png




Language & Deafness 1: WHAT IS LANGUAGE ?

Sidebar: SPEECH vs LANGUAGE

When we learned in school that nouns and verbs are “Parts of Speech”, that was technically incorrect. Nouns are verbs are really parts of language.

Speech is

  • the sounds that we make when we talk. The word cat has three sounds: /k/ /a/ and /t/.

Language is:

  • knowing what words means (vocabulary)
  • knowing how to put those words together (grammar)

Note: This is a very oversimplified definition of language. People have been discussing and writing books on the subject for thousands of years. There’s a lot more to say about language!

Big Question: WHAT IS LANGUAGE ?

We have said that language has two main components: vocabulary and grammar.

Language Component 1: VOCABULARY  – NAMES for ITEMS, ACTIONS & IDEAS

Here are some words:   dog – boy – tiger – chased – the – and

To share an idea using these words, we first must know what they mean.

The nouns (dog, boy, tiger) and verb (chased) are easy to learn because we can see examples of them and learn what they mean.

Challenge: explain the meaning of  the  and  and. These are a couple of the words often omitted or misused by D/HH language learners. And think about it: often they can be omitted from a sentence without changing its meaning.

Commonly cited vocabulary statistics: 

  • a 6-year-old child uses a 2,500-word vocabulary 
  • the same 6-year-old understands 20,000 words 
  • a 12-year-old child understands about 50,000 words.

Language Component 2:  GRAMMARHOW WE PUT WORDS TOGETHER

We all spent 12 years of school learning (among other things) the rules of language. But really, by the time we were 6 years old, we knew the most important rules about how to put words together. You learned these rules by listening to people talk. But language development is much more complex. So much so that scientists don’t yet agree on how it happens.             http://www.simplypsychology.org/language.html

Let’s use our familiar set of words to look at some of the most basic language rules.

dog     boy     tiger     chased     the     and

If I use these words to make a sentence for you, you could create a mental picture that should be a fairly accurate representation of my idea.

I could say

young-tiger-running-illustration-white-background-33097556

dog running       The dog and the boy chased the tiger.     Or, I could say

The dog and tiger chased the boy.       Orboy running

The boy and tiger chased the dog.

Each of these sentences creates a different picture. The sentences have a different meaning, even though they use the same six words.

It seems simple.

Rule #1: the order of the words changes the meaning of the sentence.

You know who is chasing and who is being chased in each sentence. That’s because you know the sub-rule: the first noun is the person or thing that is doing the action.

swap order

Let’s look again at our first rule: the order of the words changes the meaning of the sentence

Using that rule, these two sentences should have different meanings because the words are in different order.

The dog and the boy chased the tiger.

The boy and the dog chased the tiger.

Do they have different meanings? No.

Why? Because there’s another rule.

Rule #2: The order of the words DOESN’T affect the meaning of the sentence IF two words are joined by  and .

But now consider this pair of sentences,which adds 2 words.

                                      The tiger chased the dog.

                                 The tiger was chased by the dog.

The word order is the same, but the chaser and chase-ee have changed parts.

Sentences that use passive voice, like the last example above, are notoriously difficult for language learners.

Rule #3: There are many exceptions to rule #1.

But then there are …. IDIOMS

Idioms are phrases that don’t mean what their words say.rainingcatsanddogs

Type 1 Idiom – Colorful phrases

Here’s one popular idiom:    It’s raining cats and dogs!  We just have to explain this meaning to language learners. And they have to memorize it.

Type 2 Idiom – Multiple meanings

There are also more subtle idioms. Let’s go back to our dog, boy and tiger.

Dog says, “Tiger is after me!” That sentence can mean two entirely different things.

Boy: Dog, why are you running?                      Dog:Tiger is after me!

Boy: Dog, whose turn is it after yours?          Dog: Tiger is after me.

Type 3 Idiom – I-don’t-know-why-we-say-this.alarm goes off

Why do we say, “The alarm went off” when an alarm turns on?

There must be more of these puzzlements. Please share in the comments!

Click here for Language & Deafness 2: WHY IS LANGUAGE DIFFICULT for D/HH Students?

 

 

Speech and Deafness

In IQ & Deafness we discussed the assumptions we make about intelligence based on a person’s speech and language. I named four characteristics of students who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) that can lead others to misjudge their intelligence. The first of these characteristics was imperfect speech. Other features include imperfect language.

aristocrat-clipart-20.08.-Aristrocat-ClipArt

This man has perfect diction, so he’s obviously smart.

Proposition:

We unconsciously make judgments about the intelligence of an individual based on the characteristics of their speech.

Think about the actors who played the aristocracy  in the TV series Downtown Abbey – they all had perfect speech – each word pronounced carefully and precisely.

Now think about movies that have bumbling sidekick bad guys who talk with thick tongues and mispronounce words right and left.

bumbling villains

As soon as they open their mouths, you know these guys are idiots.




WHAT Exactly IS SPEECH? 

“Speech” refers to the sounds that make up our words. A common baby’s first word, “Momma,” has three sounds: mm, ah, and uh.

                             m + ah + m + uh  =   Momma Momma!

Speech is NOT making sentences, using good grammar or knowing Nouns vs. Verbs.

Stated simply:

SPEECH is using the parts of your mouth  to make sounds. 

How Did You Learn to Speak?

Who taught you to talk? The answer is (if you had typical development) “no one”.

Human brains are programmed to learn to talk just BY LISTENING to adults talk. That’s it. The typical baby in a typical environment will learn to talk without any help.

HERE’S HOW WE LEARN TO TALK

  • A baby listens to speech and imitate the sounds he hears — again and again.
  • For months, he listens and babbles, listens and babbles.
  • While babbling, he is listening to himself and refining his sounds, trying to match them to the sounds he hears from others.
  • He also hears the melodic patterns of our speech and copies them when babbling. (This is adorable to hear.)
  • By age 6, the sounds and melodic patterns he hears from himself match what he hears from others.

WHY IS DEAF SPEECH SOMETIMES IMPERFECT?

A baby who is born with a significant hearing loss doesn’t hear these sounds until he receives a hearing aid or cochlear implant. And even then, he is hearing the sounds imperfectly through man-made devices.

Imperfect sound going into the ear makes it more likely that imperfect sounds will come out of the mouth.

SLI SLO

SLI = SLO Speech/Language In = Speech/Language Out

Even with hearing aids and implants some sounds are difficult to hear. These are the sounds often left out of the speech of someone who is deaf. He doesn’t say what he doesn’t hear.

Even after a child learns to make the sounds of our language, he is often unaware when they are used because he isn’t hearing them. A common example is s at the end of words.

The speech problem becomes more complicated when we think about the child hearing his own speech. When a child fails to include the in the word cats, he is unaware of the omission because he hears himself speak in basically the same way he hears us – imperfectly. When you and I get to the end of the word cat, we know we haven’t heard the s yet, so we add it. So the production of those tough sounds must become a conscious act, and maybe eventually deeply ingrained habit.

HOW DO CHILDREN WHO ARE DEAF LEARN TO TALK?

A child who is D/HH  needs to be directly taught how to make the sounds of their language. He learns where to place his tongue, what shape his lips should make, whether or not to add his voice, and many other variables.

It’s more complicated than you think

Consider tongue placement: /t/  vs. /k/  

  • The /t/ sound brings the tongue up just behind the teeth.
  • The /k/ sound brings the tongue up at the back of the throat.
place of artic

A diagram showing the places consonant sounds are produced. Notice that m, n, ng use more than one part of our mouth/nasal passage.

diagram from http://www.tuninst.net/PHONET-UNIL/text/IPA.htm

Is your voice on or off?  /f/  vs  /v/ 

  • When we make the /f/ sound and the /v/ sound, our tongue is in the same place
  • but for /f/, we don’t use our voice, and for /v/ we do

When you consider all the challenges a student who is deaf overcomes to learn to talk, can you honestly question his intelligence?

 

Implants & Hearing Aids: NOT a FIX

UNLIKE EYEGLASSES & VISION,

cochlear implants

& hearing aids

do not fix hearing loss.

 HEARING AID     not equal       eyeglasses

Many times teachers have said, “I know she can hear me,” usually followed by comments that openly state or imply that the student is intentionally ignoring what was said.

Yet we all know that hearing something doesn’t mean you understand it.

Think about listening to a radio that isn’t tuned exactly to the station you want to hear.

You  HEAR  the voices,radio-dial_00273392

but they are DISTORTED

and there are lots of BREAKS

in the sound and STATIC around it.

That’s one way to imagine listening with a hearing aid or implant.

Hearing aids and implants

can get the radio tuned more closely to the right place on the dial.

But IT’s NOT a PERFECT SIGNAL LIKE YOU & I HEAR. 


Here’s a demonstration of listening through a hearing aid at close distance, 10 ft., with background noise and with a personal FM. 

HA Demo

Here’s a demonstration of listening through a cochlear implant.

CI Demo

Simulation begins at 2:44.


 HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT?

Both hearing aids and implants are programmed to make voices sound as loud as necessary and as clear as possible.

One is not “better” than the other. Some types of hearing loss can benefit from a cochlear implant. Others get full benefit from a hearing aid.  Which device a student uses can depend on her individual hearing loss, insurance coverage, and ultimately, parent choice.

So when a student seems to be ignoring you, or just doesn’t seem to ‘get it’, stop and remember that she is still deaf – even with her state of the art listening device.