A First Language: Whose Choice Is It?

A full-fledged system of language to rely on for classroom communication and analytical thinking—and as a foundation for emerging literacy—is an indispensible tool for any child starting first grade. In order to achieve a level of readiness for their social and scholastic challenges, children who are deaf or hard of hearing—like all children—must be surrounded very early in life by language that is fully accessible to them as a model for acquiring solid competency in their first language.

In order to provide this access, some very important decisions about linguistic input to the young deaf or hard of hearing child must be made early by hearing parents of deaf children if they are to ensure their child's timely development. Yet, it is well-documented that there is rarely enough information to determine the predisposition of a deaf infant to develop intelligible speech at the time when decisions must be made about degree of exposure to signed and spoken language as models for the child's first language development.

This paper looks at some of the issues that affect decisions about providing language input for a deaf or hard of hearing child. (Portions of this paper are excerpted from the book Educating Deaf Children Bilingually (Mahshie, 1995). The focus of the discussion will be on describing what has been learned from environments where parent-infant support and early educational placements are characterized by efforts to expose deaf children—of both hearing and deaf parents—to whole language(s) that the children find accessible for face-to-face interaction. The discussion will also include the research-based foundations for this practice. Much of the description and examples will center around what has been learned by interviewing and observing parents, teachers, researchers, and deaf students in settings in Sweden and Denmark, where efforts focused in this direction have resulted in graduates whose achievement and literacy levels are on par with their hearing peers (Lewis, 1995; Salander, S. & Svedenfors, B., 1993; Savrtholm, K., 1994). As these countries have been officially moving in the direction of educating deaf children bilingually since the early 1980's, the attributes that are present in their systems have yielded a population of deaf children and parents with unique experiences, making these settings an important environment from which to learn.