Why are many deaf people such poor written communicators?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Long, probably kind of boring, penmanship related.

Please don’t jump on me - I know many deaf people communicate just fine through writing, and I’m sure many of them are here online. I’d expect an overrepresentation of the deaf and hard of hearing online, as they can communicate and be understood without barriers they might experience elsewhere. I know one deaf person (deaf from birth) fairly well in person, and he has no problem with written communication.

So why on earth is every deaf person at the library practically incapable of writing a simple note? Seriously, every single one! The ADA equipment isn’t at my desk, so I’m sure I don’t meet every person who has trouble verbally communicating who comes in regularly, but we do have, say, four or five regulars with whom I have contact pretty often, and maybe, say, twenty that I’ll see now and again. Obviously, these are people who are either deaf or so hard of hearing that it creates an obstacle to communicating with a librarian - I may well speak to many people daily who have gotten so good at reading lips and speaking without an accent that I don’t realize they have a hearing impairment. (And of course I talk to a lot of old people who can’t hear worth a damn also, but obviously I’m talking here about people who have been deaf or hard of hearing from birth or young childhood.)

Anyway. Most of these people read lips pretty well, although a few need me to write down my responses. They all communicate via written notes. (I don’t understand ASL.) Uniformly, always, and forever, these notes are almost impossible to cipher out. Luckily, they’re generally about a narrow range of topics. (I’m a librarian in a library, one assumes you’re trying to ask me a library question - except for the guy who harangues me in millions of slips of blue paper about our computers, but I know what to expect from him.) They don’t make any sense, for one thing. I finally figured out that it must be because ASL has a different “grammar”, right? So, okay, they’re asking it as they’d say it, even though one assumes they read plenty of books written in standard English. But their handwriting! Jesus Christ on a cracker, I can’t read it! And trust me, I am no handwriting snob. I can decipher a lot of stuff, but there are notes these patrons hand me that I just cannot figure out, when you put the handwriting together with the syntax. My doctor writes prescriptions more clearly.

So, why? Am I right about the syntax? Here’s an example - “Oh is that why it possible not working server?” I assume that works out to either “Oh, is that why - the server might not be working?” or “Oh, is that why the server is possibly not working?” Is that an example of ASL syntax?

It’s the penmanship I don’t get. If you’re as profoundly deaf as these patrons seem to be, this is your only way to communicate with the vast majority of the hearing world, right? People used to hang slates around their necks. Wouldn’t somebody correct you at some point in your childhood because nobody can read your handwriting? It isn’t like speech - I understand why it must be incredibly difficult for people with hearing problems to learn how to speak clearly. But you can see writing! Is it because of a lack of good education? The deaf guy I know went to a boarding school, which I believe was common when he was a kid. Maybe the deaf people I see at the library are more likely to have been stuck with poor schools where their needs weren’t met? (They aren’t all obviously poor, though - the server guy had a sweet new laptop. Many of my library patrons are poor, of course, though.)

So, first of all, am I crazy? Do I just have the deaf population with the most illegible handwriting in the world here? I want to help them the same way I’d help other patrons, but I cannot make some of their questions out for love nor money! Second of all, are there reasons for it? Are they pretty much what I was thinking, or is there more to it?

2

You should read “Seeing Voices” by Oliver Sacks. ASL (and other sign languages) have a physical/spatial grammar. So, a word order grammar is not part of their primary language experience. That makes it hard, like you use english as your spoken language but you can only write in Chinese.

As far as handwriting, I have no idea.

3

You’re not crazy. I used to work as a Relay Operator for the deaf, and I was astounded by the poor English skills of many early-deafened persons. In part it’s because they often learn to speak late because of delays in diagnosis. In part it’s because the grammatical structure of American Sign Language is very different than English. But it’s also sometimes deliberate, I think. I’ve met a few deaf persons who simply refuse to adjust their grammar to conventions because they feel discriminated against when asked to do so.

4

Well, if you want to know where the bathroom is, you’re gonna have to ask me so I can understand you. I’m sorry, I wish I could sign or understand your chicken scratch or anything so I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself by trying to ask people to repeat themselves or to write it again, but that’s the hearing world for you.

5

Deaf education for years was abysmal. Yeah, it makes sense that teaching deaf kids to read and write would be pretty important.

Except for years many deaf educators had the idea that if deaf kids were allowed to sign, they wouldn’t learn to read lips or vocalize. And so what happens when you’re trying to teach a bunch of deaf kids to read lips, vocalize, read and write in English, when none of them can understand English because they’re, you know, deaf? They don’t learn anything.

If you could sign to the kids you could explain the concepts in sign. But no, signing is a crutch, and if you give the kids the crutch they’ll never learn! And so you’ve got to teach everything orally. And it turns out that this doesn’t work. And so you have generations of deaf kids who learned almost nothing at schools for the deaf, except from other deaf kids.

And this is the source of “Deaf Culture”–you take a bunch of linguistically isolated kids and put them together in boarding schools for the deaf and cut them off from effective communication with everyone except the other deaf kids, and what happens? They form their own community.

And this is how you get the sorry spectacle of functionally illiterate deaf people.

6

I still don’t get how “orally” produces bad handwriting. Handwriting is visual, isn’t it? When I was a grade school kid, we had the poster of the letters up there, and that paper with the dotted half-lines, etc., etc., etc. It’s copying. Did many kids just not learn good handwriting because they’d totally given up on the whole school thing? I could see that, of course.

I don’t know if it’s everywhere, but here the boarding school my friend went to was the school for the deaf and the blind. If there are two groups of people who are less likely to be able to communicate with one another I don’t know what they’d be.

7

All of this is true, and all of it is stuff I should have included in my answer. But I’d like to add that in some cases it’s deliberate. When I was a relay operator I had a good number of customers I’d get often enough to recognize. I remember one young lady who, in conversations with his mother, made it very clear that she understood and could use English grammar but refused to use it because she felt others should accommodate her. This attitude permeated her interactiosn with others.

8

Think of it this way - how do learn the meaning of the words “right” and “wrong” “correct” and “incorrect” or even “[checkmark]” or “[crossout].” They are symbols that make reference to a spoken language.

If the teacher has no common language with the student (not permitted to sign) how exactly are they going to explain, without words, the meaning of such words? Pretty much the same way you would teach a dog, and that was the level of deaf education for many many years.

9

On an SF board I frequent, there is a young man – very nice kid, just turned 18 – who is profoundly deaf apparently since birth. He can read written English just fine, but his posts are composed in ASL – not a joke, and not meaning he does pictures of hand signs; the ‘shorthands’ and syntax are those of ASL rather than written English. Reading his posts is a challenge in the way that deciphering leetspeak is, but (for me and other regulars, at least) without the annoyance – he’s writing in his native idiom and the results are quite clear if a bit bizarre by written-English standards.

10

It is possible that I know of whom you speak. How is that any less dickish than me speaking Italian with English grammar?

11

Polycarp, ISTM that if a child is getting a decent education (I assume schools like Lemur is talking about don’t exist anymore, or I hope so), how is it any different from a child raised in a bilingual household? I.e. a child who speaks mostly Spanish at home doesn’t go out into an English-speaking society speaking Spanish, so why would someone who is capable of reading and writing English do that instead of the obvious problems of using ASL syntax?

I have a deaf acquaintance who does this- any online communication is almost indecipherable to the point that a mutual friend insists that he must have slight mental retardation. I’ve tried explaining the syntax of ASL to her but she still insists he’s mildly retarded because he seems virtually unable to communicate in written English.

I don’t understand why you’d do that to yourself. Certainly I’d expect loved ones to learn ASL to communicate with me, but for interactions with strangers I think I’d make absolutely certain that they could understand me.

12

I can’t really comment on the grammar issue other than that it’s pretty common for people who are ESL. My dad’s been in CAN/US for over 30 years, and he *still *has trouble with certain tenses in English. Drives me batty, it does, but that’s part of his charm.

I’ve wondered if part of the language debate is more notable because of the added dimension that the people in question are deaf and thus operating from a doubly handicapped (heh) position as opposed to your run of the mill immigrant with functional ears and rudimentary English. Also, while bilingual education is a hot issue in border states like Texas and California, I don’t know that immigrants in the US seem to be nearly half as sensitive about the languge as a lot of Deaf people tend to be, exactly because ASL defines so much of our history plus what the world is to us.

That said, what Lemur866 said about academics at oral schools for the deaf is largely true IME. We weren’t allowed to use sign, but we just went and developed a semi-underground ‘home sign’ that we could claim wasn’t really sign language when cornered on the subject. I know I suck at lip reading, so I tended to half-ass my classes, myself.

Unfortunately, RedRosesForMe, there are several oral schools for the deaf that are most definitely alive and well today. I attended one in the 80s, and I still get emails inviting me to their class reunions. (Fuck no. Worst four years of my life. I shake the dust of your entire state off my heels, thankyakindly)

I suspect the handwriting thing might just be your sample size, possibly. How old are these patrons?

13

Wide range of ages - I don’t know, 25 to 60? The one with the worst handwriting is also the one with the “worst” “deaf habits”, if you know what I mean - grunting, squealing, makes a lot of noise with tables and chairs and such. So somebody like that, you wonder if they got any real education at all, or if somebody just ignored them their whole lives. (That’s the one that bitches at us about our computer issues, weirdly.) He’s also kind of unkempt and comes in with a man who I’m quite sure is deaf and mentally disabled, so they may live in some sort of group home or something. He might be crazy, I don’t know - it’s hard to tell when somebody has one disability if they also have another.

14

That really, truly sucks. I can certainly understand why you’d want to emphasize lip-reading and vocalizing as alternate methods of communication with the non-hearing-impaired, but to do so at the exclusion of ASL seems ridiculously short-sighted. I mean, WTF?

15

Yes, it’s basicly an English as a Second Language problem. Research has shown that dhh kids make the same grammartical errors as do native speakers of other languages.
For oral kids a lot of times it’s b/c while they can hear and speak, they’re not getting the full benifit of spoken language. For example, my friend who was orally educated cannot put together a coherent sentance.
Also dhh people tend to have high nonverbal IQs and lower verbal IQs.
re: the poor education…back in the day the experts thought that we were basicly MR, and so tailored the education. In more recent years the edcuation at schools for the deaf have improved, but a lot of kids are falling though the cracks in mainstream situions, where the teachers don’t know how to teach dhh kids.

16

Hello Again writes:

> So, a word order grammar is not part of their primary language experience.

American Sign Language does have word order grammar:

It’s different from the word order of English though. ASL has a complicated grammar that uses spatial motions that have no equivalent in spoken languages besides the word ordering that spoken languages use.

17

My understanding is that this is why they came up with Signed English, and when I was in high school the trend was for them to start truly little kids on Signed English and get them used to the grammar and syntax of standard English before teaching them ASL. One of my friends at the time wanted to be a teacher for dhh kids, so she did a lot of volunteer work and tutoring with a couple of dhh elementary students, and the way she explained it to me was that these kids had a massively easier time learning to read and write this way. Which makes sense, really–how do you teach a child to read the word “going” when in her native language there is only “go”? Not very well or easily, is how.

So is this still the trend for educating dhh children?

18

Ok, every language has a some word order grammar. To say that ASL lacked a word order grammar was wrong. However, there are languages, and ASL is one of them, in which word order is a significantly weaker indicator of meaning than in English (other signals and structures provide the meaning). In English word order is an extremely strong indicator of meaning. “Dog chase cat” and “cat chase dog” mean completely different things.

If the word order is basically correct, native English speakers will understand you even if you chose the wrong actual words. The right words in the wrong order will be very confusing.

“me want gone” is an incorrect but understandable construction of “I want to go.” if you jumble the word order, however, and say “want I go to” the words are more correct but the meaning is less understandable.

See what I’m saying?

19

My oldest sister is Deaf. The emails she writes are indecipherable to my husband, and he has asked if she has any learning disorders or anything.

Nope, that’s the way she writes, and the way she speaks/signs. We are used to it, but to others it can be a little tough.

20

Heh, I learned some very basic bits of ASL about ten years ago when there was a really hot girl on my co-ed baseball team who was hearing impaired. But I’ll be damned if I could figure out the syntax smoothly. Like I couldn’t figure out how to sign “Can I buy you a beer?” in away that didn’t also come across as if I was asking her to by me a beer. :smack:

I did find out something I had never known though about her written communication. In addition to regular written English, she wrote in “ASL GLOSS”. It’s a text representation of ASL that but definitely not like normal written English. There is a snippet of info on it here. Anyway, if she wrote a note, sometimes it would be an unusual combination of written English (sometimes with ASL syntax) and ASL GLOSS.

ETA: At work or at school though, where she was expected to produce written material for co-workers and such, her written English was top notch. The unusual combinations of syntax were usually in a very informal context, like jotting down a quick note for friends.