Gosh. So, 3 - can you read? is offensive? I read a great article (which I can't find, of course) on some website a while ago, and it was about how people in the deaf communities don't trust "hearies" and ignored AIDS literature because they believed it to be a hearie conspiracy. I found that TIME did an article in 1994 on it, though, and that has proved useful. > Why should a deaf person be more vulnerable to the 20th century plague than a blind person or, for that matter, the average American? The answer, say deaf activists, is that their peers do not read English. The first language of more than half of America's deaf, whose number is variously estimated at between 250,000 and 2 million, is American Sign Language (ASL). Half of the deaf in America don't (or didn't, in 1994) read english? So I guess that's a pretty good question, considering it's a coinflip. edit: I found the article! http://poz.com/articles/226_1609.shtml
I had found the article not long after but hadn't had the chance to edit it in. Now I did, and I wanted to update you: http://poz.com/articles/226_1609.shtml
This article shines a lot of light on the cultural differences between deaf Americans and hearing Americans. That there is little vocabulary for science in ASL, is extremely worrying. The fact that there are those among the deaf community that consider ASL to be "better" than English, is even more worrying. Thanks again for taking the time to find that article."There's a lack of sign-language vocabulary for science and its diseases," Karen Sadler says. "It's difficult to get across the meaning of words such as positive, which in medical terminology has the opposite meaning from the traditional definition."
according to this article, learning to read for a deaf person is comparable to someone that can hear learning to read a foreign language. I would imagine it would be like me learning to read chinese, they would just be symbols with no phonetic attachment. That 50% number seems pretty high, not sure I buy that.
I'm not satisfied with that article, but it does bring up some interesting points. I know that among learners who can hear, writing and learning how to spell in a target language is pretty crucial for pronunciation, at least that's what the current literature says. I wonder if part of it is because signing is a much more dynamic (in terms of sheer physical movement) system than speaking. People have different preferences for learning and recalling information, but kinetic memory is very, very strong. If that's your primary experience, then I think it would be very difficult to learn to remember all the rules and associated stuff that goes with communicating in grammatically correct written English.