Literary Advancement for Hearing Impaired Hispanic Children
Hispanics are the largest minority in the United States and increasing rapidly. Currently about fifteen million Hispanics are of school age of which nearly ten thousand are deaf or hard of hearing according the United States Census.
Hispanic hard-of- hearing and deaf students are one of the fastest growing minorities among the deaf -community. There are many challenges encountered by Hispanic Hearing-Impaired children. They have the responsibility of learning two languages at once. They must learn English but they must also learn American Sign Language. They must also acclimate to the English, Deaf and Spanish culture.
There is a social-cultural viewpoint on literary advancement that affects Hispanic deaf students that depends on many different social interactive roles in the child’s life such as caretakers, the child’s family, members of the deaf community, educators and members of our country’s culture.
The key point is that hard-of-hearing or deaf students must learn and practice American Sign Language in order to communicate, if the child’s parents do not speak English that becomes a large bridge to cross. In order to supplement the child with home learning the parents also must learn English.
Many Hispanics are not aware of the resources available to them for literary advancement. For example, there is a company that manufactures and distributes trilingual educational sign language videos.
They have created a curriculum that ties in the separate languages to include Spanish, English and American Sign Language. The child will be learning the three languages while the family will learn English at the same time as they learn sign language vocabulary.
It is a challenge to teach ASL to Non-English speaking individuals due to many factors including syntax, meaning and grammar.
There are many resources out there to assist Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing Hispanic children and their families. Do your research and we can promote literary advancement and give these children the tools they need to succeed.
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