Signing Out?

As president of the board of the Listen foundation, a not-for-profit agency that funds auditory-verbal therapy for deaf kids whose parents want them to learn to listen and talk, I wrote the following editorial in our recent newsletter:

As I was approaching the Cherry Creek hotel for the A.G. Bell Oral Conference last month, a crowd of individuals wearing yellow shirts exhorted me to toot if I supported….well, sign language, I think. I didn’t toot. It wasn’t that I don’t support sign language, but I wanted to find out more about what this group represented. I later chatted with some of the group, who feel that children who are deaf have the right to learn the natural language of the deaf – sign language – and that should have primacy over listening and speech for deaf children. So I decided that perhaps I should take this opportunity to restate what the Listen Foundation is about:

We believe parents are the ones who have the right to make choices for their very young children, and that parents should make an informed choice – considering all options available for deaf children, from Total Communication to Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT). We advocate AVT because we believe it is most often the best choice for families, since it presents the opportunity for deaf children to join with hearing children in common activities – learning, playing, making friends, etc. We are certainly not against children in AVT learning to sign, but not while they are learning language itself. Once a child is proficient at listening and talking, then he/she may chose to also learn sign language. We don’t think signing is wrong or inferior, but simply that very few people use it to communicate. Almost everyone listens and talks – why shouldn’t children who are deaf?

I believe the main worry of the yellow-shirted demonstrators is that sign language will disappear as more and more deaf kids learn to listen and talk, and that feels like the disappearance of the culture in which they live. And that would indeed be sad – ASL is a beautiful, expressive language. But that really doesn’t justify their misrepresenting AVT and “oralism” as unnatural and damaging to the deaf child.
This is not the first time the deaf culture has worried about its disappearance. The yellow pamphlets being handed out quoted George Veditz, who called sign “God’s most noble gift to the deaf”, and from 1910 to1920 put together a collection of films of signers signing, “so that future generations might see master signers of the past” [Gallaudet Library]. Personally, I think listening and talking is God’s most noble gift – to everyone