Literacy gap among the deaf?

Factual Questions
1

This article:

Judge: White House briefings must provide sign language for deaf Americans : NPR

comments fairly far down that:

According to the NAD, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. communicate mainly in ASL, and many deaf and hard of hearing people do not know English. ASL has its own vocabulary and grammar that is different from English.

I guess where I’m confused is that AFAIK, you can’t write ASL. So as a deaf person, you may speak to others in ASL, but you’re basically illiterate if you can’t read and write English. And I’m finding it a bit of a stretch to think that there are hundreds of thousands of adult primary ASL speakers who are unable to read or write English.

Is there a huge literacy gap there? Is illiteracy a bigger problem among the deaf? And if so, is the issue here (beyond the fact that the Trump Administration are insensitive dicks) really that captioning is insufficient because of this literacy gap?

This seems more weird the more I read it; I mean, my first thought would be that modern captioning should be adequate for most things, but that ASL interpreters are not a huge lift for the government to employ either. Except that this makes it sound like they’re necessary not just nice to have.

2

21% of all US adults are illiterate and 54% read at below a sixth grade level. Thus, if the briefing were broadcast only in text with no audio, a large part of the population couldn’t understand it.

But it’s also true that literacy rates are lower among the deaf population. I’m seeing some stuff that attributes this at least partially to the inability of deaf people to connect the spelling of a word to its pronunciation the way a hearing person can.

3

As the father of a sixth grader who’s on-level, that level of reading comprehension is fully compatible with reading subtitles, captions, newspaper articles, etc.

I was more curious as to whether the deaf literacy gap is a linguistic thing where ASL and English are incompatible enough that it’s extremely difficult to learn English if you’re a native ASL speaker, or if there’s something else going on.

Beyond that… how does one function if you’re illiterate in today’s society? It seems like ALL of it is predicated on being able to at least do basic reading of stuff like signs, government forms, and so forth.

4

Can you define what “illiterate” means with that statistic?

Can’t read at all? Poor comprehension but can read? If so, at what level? Put another way, where is the line on “illiteracy” drawn? I think all here on the SDMB are literate but doubtless we all have varying degrees of comprehension and writing ability.

So many kids are into texting I’d be surprised at any who could not read at all (barring a mental disability).

5

This is kind of a stupid anecdote but it fits here. There’s a man who was on one of the 90 Day Fiancee franchise seasons (The Other Way) who is deaf and uses ASL. Since he’s a “reality star” he posts on Instagram, so you can see how he writes. He definitely has a hard time writing in English. His name is david.dangerfield1 if you’d like to see.

6

I believe the definition of “illiterate” being used in this statistic is falling below Level 1 literacy. Wikipedia says “Adults scoring below Level 1 can comprehend simple sentences and short paragraphs with minimal structure but will struggle with multi-step instructions or complex sentences.”

7

I asked my wife, who has a degree in Deaf Education and taught hearing-impaired (and other students with disabilities) for 35 years. Here’s what she had to say:

Are there hundreds of thousands of Americans who communicate by ASL? She hasn’t seen the numbers lately, but almost certainly YES.

Is it difficult for deaf students to learn to read and write. YES. One big reason is that deaf people miss out on phonics (the whole "sounds like bat, but it has a C. What do you think that word sounds like - teaching method.)

Are deaf people inherently likely to be illiterate? She can’t answer that without a clear definition of illiteracy. But she points out that there are many hearing people who can’t read (she then rattled off a host of learning disorders that impact reading and writing. Let’s just say it’s more than just dyslexia.) Intensive instruction can help many if not most of them, but there are millions of people, hearing and non-hearing, who need help “to at least do basic reading of stuff like signs, government forms, and so forth,” or get by by getting by.

Anecdote: I worked with a salesman who was constantly getting complaints about getting client instructions wrong. It turned out that he was at least functionally illiterate and developed a host of strategies to fake his way through. He was intelligent and had a good vocabulary, but he couldn’t read a document or even write a simple memo.

8

Just remember that for most deaf people, English is a foreign language. Now how many Americans are incapable of reading any foreign language? I can barely read French and cannot read any other language. This point was made strongly in a “talk” I “heard” by a deaf linguist. There was of course a two-way ASL/English interpreter to translate him and to translate questions for him. I believe there is a Doper who does (or used to do) that. Was it @RivkahChaya ? Once you learn English, learning to read is relatively easy.

9

Also, I am sure that there are many people who could, with some effort, read a transcript of a briefing in a language foreign to them, but could not keep up with the same briefing captioned in real time.

10

Sign Languages can be written. That site has a number of resources for that. There’s also a pretty good discussion of Signwriting on Wikipedia. There’s even a shorthand version of Signwriting. Finally, a German site for Signwriting has a nice animated title.

11

The deaf culture is difficult for the hearing to understand.

I read and speak ASL. I was taught in a mostly hearing impaired class. Some profound some were just HoH.

I hear perfectly well, but I don’t speak. So I use ASL as a crutch.

If it’s the only way you communicate you are more fluent.

I can see why they’re not so concerned with the written word.

But…texting and typed communications are so ubiquitous now. I think it may become more important to them.

12

There is written ASL? (really asking…if so what does that look like?)

13

Much like “reading lips,” I presume Beck can ‘read’ the ASL signs being offered by another communicator.

14

Yes, I mean reading the signers hands and expression.

(I read in this thread there is a written on paper sign language. I’ve never seen it. I’m gonna read the link when I get a minute)

15

I worked for 15 years as an ASL interpreter, before carpal tunnel syndrome benched me; I had treatment for it, and I can still have ASL conversation, so I hang out with Deaf friends all the time.

I have been studying and learning ASL my entire adult life. I achieved the core of my knowledge at Gallaudet University.

The is no written form of ASL. There are a few different systems linguists use to record it on paper in order to write articles about, or compile dictionaries, but there has never been a single, standardized system, and since most papers are online now, people have stopped trying to “write out” ASL, and just put in clips of people speaking in ASL the things they wish to discuss in their papers.

ASL is correctly termed “spoken,” and either “received,” or “understood.”
People whose only language is ASL are NOT “non-verbal.”

Deaf people who have Deaf parents, and therefore speak ASL from the cradle, statistically have the highest rates of literacy of all Deaf people in the US. (credit: PhD dissertation by Dr. Barbara Kannapell, degree awarded by Georgetown University)

The reason for the high rates of literacy among Deaf people with Deaf parents is theorized to be the high rate of language deprivation still seen among Deaf children of hearing parents, vs. pretty much zero rates among Deaf children of Deaf parents.

About 5% of Deaf people have Deaf parents.

Many Deaf children (of hearing parents) still are not introduced to ASL until age 3, when they are required to receive publicly funded education under Public Law 94-142 (1975-- the Education of all Handicapped Children); before that they may be exposed to pidgin sign, English-y signs, or just home signs and gestures. Some are not introduced to any signed language at all (even home signs are discouraged) until much later-- they must “fail” at Oralism (speaking and lipreading only) first, or fail at “hearing” school, and transferred to a Deaf school, or Deaf program within a hearing school, along with feelings of shame and worthlessness.

And many parents of ASL-speaking Deaf children do not know any “sign language,” not even half-assed pidgin sign, let alone ASL.

Most Deaf children have not been read to as toddlers and preschoolers, and have not had “reading readiness” experiences in those years. They don’t get reading readiness until they are 4 or 5 sometimes, and so when they start first grade, they are already behind, both in reading readiness, and in language acquisition. Their early elementary years are often spent just remediating this.

Some Deaf schools and Deaf programs in public schools do not hire teachers with ASL competency. Why is a story of oppression that goes back to 1880, to something called the Conference of Milan. I am not going to get started on this, or this post will never end.

But oppression is real, and Audism is real.