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RACHID MIMOUN t is obvious that hearing adults usually communicate easily and are completely at home in sOciety, while deaf individuals have many problems integrating. This creates impediments in relations between deaf and hearing persons. I think that in order to explain these impediments, one must look to the respective childhoods of deaf and hearing people. Within the culture of the hearing, being able to hear is critical. Hearing people establish their social world and become a part of that world on the basis of a hearing norm. Deaf children develop differently. they base their behavior on their own perception of things. When attending class at a very early age, hearing children already possess a language , an oral language, the hearing language, acquired through language immersion. This process permits them to conceptualize and understand what is being said around them and to express themselves through cries, which gradually develop into speech. Such children have a totally valuable and fertile auditory life. To cite an example, when a child drops a bottle on the ground, an adult can intervene, explaining: "You must be careful of bottles, they can break," etc. Thus, there is an explanatory dimension for the hearing child through spoken language, which is deeply significant. For deaf individuals, it is a different story. When they are small, deaf children are totally deprived of any language. (Of course, I am referring to those deaf children lacking exposure to French Sign Language-LSF.) Deaf children understand nothing of the conversations between two hearing persons. They play alone and, as they do not have full access to an auditory language, are unable to comprehend the language around them. If a deaf child should drop a bottle on the ground, hearing adults may scold the child, but they cannot explain to the child why a bottle should not be dropped. This specific example shows just how precious language can be for social integration and for understanding one's own life. Without language, deaf children cannot be rendered responsible by means of explanation, as hearing children can. Hearing children can say, "Ah, yes. That's right; they told me this and that." They are able to grasp the consequences and are thus rendered responsible for their actions. Deaf children are not; they are left to their own devices. They inhabit a nonsensical world. They do not progress. Here is another example: When a teacher introduces a subject to a hearing student, the student usually answers, "Thank you," knowing that in society, one offers thanks 666 THE DEAF WAY ~ DeafjHearing Interaction for such things. The deaf child, on the other hand, will offer no thanks. The teacher must intervene to tell the deaf child, "Thank me; you have to do it," without giving any explanations. The deaf child experiences this intervention as humiliating. He or she is unable to understand why these social rules were established, has no way of knowing that they are a standard for all of society. There is also the issue of facial expression. Very often a hearing child who forgets to say "thank you" is looked at irritatedly by a hearing adult. The hearing child will make the connection with the situation that has just occurred-forgetting to say "thank you." The deaf child, however, will simply suspect that the adult is wicked. Such failures to communicate often lead to behavior problems in deaf adolescents. Hearing children, after one or two awkward incidents or errors, manage to right things again. Because they have been immersed in the language, in explanations, they can foresee the consequences of their actions. For deaf children, the opposite occurs; they don't correct their misunderstandings. Quite the contrary-their behavior problems become more and more serious, to the point in the relationship where the hearing adult will be forced to punish the deaf child to make the child realize that he or she has committed an error. Not until they are sixteen or seventeen years old do deaf adolescents begin to understand that breaking things is wasteful, while a ten-year-old hearing child will have already grasped the idea. These differences, and the potential estrangement and conflict that can develop between deaf and hearing people, become noticeable around the age of eighteen, at adulthood. In my opinion, the problems in relations between deaf and hearing individuals are attributable to the schools. Many things are lacking in the education of deaf children, which does not allow them to become whole, self-sufficient human beings in...

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