Actually what I was wondering is how do you teach someone to read when you can’t associate sounds with letters. I did some quick research on the subject though and I found that you can compare a deaf person learning how to read as a normal person learning a second language, of course with signers you first language has no written system, only gestures. Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that’s very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography.
'' Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words "paper" and "movie." Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are.
TOM ALLEN: “The sign for paper, you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper. Now, movie is, like, very similar. One of the hands keeps a flat hand shape and it just kind of lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen.”
So yea I was wondering all that though I already found the answer I was looking for !
Giannny19 karma
Actually what I was wondering is how do you teach someone to read when you can’t associate sounds with letters. I did some quick research on the subject though and I found that you can compare a deaf person learning how to read as a normal person learning a second language, of course with signers you first language has no written system, only gestures. Anyone who has a first language that has a written system that’s very different than English, like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, knows that learning to recognize and understand words in English is much more challenging than if you already speak a language that uses the same orthography.
'' Signers can face the same problems as other bilingual people. Their brains have to choose between two languages all the time. Take the words "paper" and "movie." Their spelling and meaning are not at all similar. But, as Professor Allen points out, the signs for them are.
TOM ALLEN: “The sign for paper, you hold one hand flat and you just lightly tap it with a flat palm on the other hand, and you do that a couple times and that means paper. Now, movie is, like, very similar. One of the hands keeps a flat hand shape and it just kind of lightly moves back and forth as if it were a flickering image on a screen.”
So yea I was wondering all that though I already found the answer I was looking for !
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