Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor To the Editor: At the risk of boring some of your readers, I must force a reply to Barbara Luetke-Stahlman's (December 1982) rejoinder to a letter written by me (June 1982). Before proceeding, however, I would like to suggest that you consider publishing comments and replies in the same issue as is the practice with most academic journals. Ms. Luetke-Stahlman seems to have been upset by some of my comments about an earlier article which suggested to me that all one had to do to teach better language skills to deaf children was accept ASL as a language. My efforts to point out that there is a little more to it than that apparently did not sit well with my colleague from Nebraska. I must admit to some confusion over her letter . If we are to accept one of her contentions at face value, we are forced to assume that fluency in, say, colloquial Japanese will insure competence in reading English. She pointedly disputes a statement made by me that fluent reading of English is dependent upon English language competency. One must marvel at how it is possible to fluently read and comprehend a language in which one has no competence . . . pedagogical slight of hand perhaps? As far as Ms. Luetke-Stahlman's statement that we have our work cut out for us, there can be no argument there. Demagoguery aside, no one can claim to have the magic solution to the problem: precisely the point of my original letter. Ms. Luetke-Stahlman cites her own publications in justification of a bilingual approach to educating deaf children. At best, the comparisons she wants to make between speech-based bilingual education (e.g., French-English, Spanish -English) and education of deaf children with ASL as a primary language are limited to somewhat less than 10% of the population of deaf children. This is the percentage of such children with deaf parents. Almost all bilingual research has been done on children who have a primary language spoken in the home. Or does Ms. Luetke-Stahlman advocate. . . shudder. . . mass adoption of deaf children by deaf foster parents at the time of diagnosis? As this profession has witnessed time and time again, panaceas are always long on promise and short on performance. Perhaps it will be sufficient to warn readers that they should take Ms. Luetke-Stahlman's nostrums with the proverbial grain of salt. RichardG. Stoker Pennsylvania State University To the Editor: In response to Dr. Stoker's reply to my December (1982) Letter to the Editor, I acknowledge the wit, but find him lacking comprehension of the content of my letter. In my December letter I disputed Dr. Stoker's assumption that English language competency (especially oral speaking skill) is necessary for the acquisition of fluent English reading skills and went on to stress that what does seem to be a necessary component is a strong, natural language base. Indeed, a child who has acquired Japanese naturally and is able to linguistically manipulate that language will learn to read English more proficiently than a child who has no language base (the reader is referred to my Annals October 1982 article). The situation is that most hearing-impaired children enter school with no language base—in any language—and are taught English literacy skills despite this. I suggest that this is one reason why hearing-impaired students never learn to read well. We do not know (despite that Stoker and many others quote a 10% figure) how many children are ASL-dominant or ASL/oral or manual English -bilinguals. Hearing-impaired children should be assessed (Luetke-Stahlman, Annals, December 1982) in terms of language and/or system benefit on academic/cognitive tasks and allowed to demonstrate their "first language." Most adult deaf bilinguals would be quick to tell Stoker that they learned ASL in residential dorms and from deaf adult cultural role models; deaf parents are not a requirement. Please, readers, do not take my "nostrums" with a grain of salt as Stoker suggests; do research'. Barbara Luetke-Stahlman Coordinator, Hearing Impaired Program College of Education University of Nebraska-Omaha A.A.O. I August 1983...