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KAREN LLOYD hen I was asked to speak about literacy and the Deaf community , I thought, "I can't talk about literacy: I don't know anything about it!" I felt intimidated by the fact that I didn't know anything about teaching people to read and write-as a librarian I'd never been involved in programs addressing literacy. That word, "literacy," bothered me. It seemed like a word that only people such as teachers of remedial reading could discuss with any authority. Then I realized that in the course of my involvement with the Deaf community, I had actually been talking about and working around the problems of literacy for years. What was giving me a mental block regarding this paper was that we never called it "literacy"! What we talked about was the difficulty that many Deaf people have with English. Australia is a multicultural society: A large proportion of its population comes from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Whether or not these people are literate in their own language, is it appropriate to say that, because they are now living in a country whose official language is English, they must be able to read and write fluently in English in order to be considered "literate"? Is it appropriate to say that their skills and proficiencies in their own language are no longer of value? How insulting! And what a waste! Deaf people who are fluent in Australian Sign Language (AusIan) are part of that multicultural population. Auslan is officially recognized as a language in its own right, and for many deaf Australians, English is a second language. How appropriate is it to say that Deaf people who are fluent in Auslan but have trouble with English are illiterate? Most of us, when we think of literacy, think of the printed page. The problem with talking about sign language and literacy is that sign language cannot be written down. "Literacy" seems an inappropriate word when we are talking about nonwritten languages. But Deaf people do have a means of recording information in their own language: Film and video are to sign language what the printed page is to English. Another reason I panicked at the idea of talking about literacy was that literacy, both in English and in sign language, can be a sensitive issue in the Deaf community. I'll tell you two stories to illustrate this point. The first one is about me. When I first got involved with the Deaf community, I didn't know anything about it. I was born hearing. I became deaf when I was eight and grew up in a hearing environment in a small country town, so I never really met other 292 THE DEAF WAY ~ Deaf History Deaf people until I moved to Sydney when I was in my early twenties. The first thing I had to do was learn the language. Eight years later, I am embarrassed to admit that I am still not fluent enough to be able to present this paper in Auslan. The second story is about an organization of Deaf people with which I am involved. Last year another organization working with Deaf people sent our organization a draft policy paper and asked for our comments. In their cover letter, they said that if we preferred , we could send our comments in sign on video and they would arrange to have the video transcribed into English. There were two very different reactions to this offer. One group of people said, "That's nice of them, but how can we comment on this paper when we can't understand it in the first place? If it's okay to send our response on video, why didn't they send us the paper on video?" The second group said, "We're insulted! Do they think our English is so bad we can't write our response?" The point, of course, is that deafness alone does not tell us anything about a person 's literacy skills. Some Deaf people are fluent in English and some are not; some are fluent in sign language and some are not; some are bilingual and some are not; and many of us are sensitive about the area in which we feel our skills are lacking. Anyone who makes assumptions or generalizations is liable to hurt somebody's feelings or get jumped on, so I feel rather like a sitting duck. However, I am not going to talk about solving Deaf people...

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