Debbie Golos, professor of Deaf Education in the Department of Educational Psychology’s special education program and coordinator for the Deaf/Hard of Hearing (DHH) teaching licensure and M.Ed. program and Jonathan Penny, coordinator for the American Sign Language (ASL) program were recently quoted in the Minnesota Daily article, “In blended families, Deaf literacy is vital for communication.”
The article discusses the value of early access to visual language for d/Deaf children—specifically those with hearing parents. After noticing a gap between the literacy skills of sixth grade deaf children who had been exposed to ASL from birth and those who had not, Golos developed a video series called Peter’s Picture to promote language and literacy development in DHH children. Increasing evidence shows that learning ASL can benefit all children—deaf, hard of hearing, hearing, and deaf children who use spoken language. ASL helps increase children’s spoken language skills because it provides a foundation for language. Penny, whose first language is ASL, says videos, like the Peter’s Picture series, are an extremely effective way to teach ASL. “Whether the parents are skilled or not skilled (in ASL), it’s important to give children a way to learn ASL because ASL is their natural language, period,” he told the Minnesota Daily. In the article, Golos discussed plans for future research—creating additional videos in the series and supplemental materials for teachers and deaf children but also adding voice over options for those who are not fluent in ASL. Finally, she’d like to conduct additional studies to see how these types of educational media can be used both in the classroom and at home.
