Well, once we found out Ray was hearing impaired that brought on a whole new set of IEP goals. We changed Ray’s school to better meet those needs. He started 3rd Grade at Canterberry Woods Elementary. Fairfax County supports 3 modalities for hearing impaired students. They have sign language, whole language, and cued language or cued speech. Signing made no sense for us or for Ray. We didn’t know sign and neither did he, but he did have some level of verbal language since he wasn’t born hearing impaired. The audiologist pretty much said, let him learn to use his technology, meaning let him learn just as if he were not hearing impaired. That’s pretty much what whole language systems do.
They expect you to rely on your hearing aids and lip reading skills to absorb the language used around you. The 3rd option was one we’d never heard of until this point. It was Cued Language or Cued Speech. The easiest way I’ve found to describe cueing to someone who’s never done it or seen it is that it’s like hand signal phonics. It represents all phonemic sounds with hand shapes and positions so that you can visually gain knowledge of all the phonemes that you would normally learn auditorially. It’s been an amazing system for him and has actually been quite easy for us to learn. (Well me anyway, Don has not really had the time to give to practicing it.) The advantage to cueing over a system like sign language is that it promotes literacy and reading ability. Sign language is it’s own language. It is not English. Sign language has no written form. To learn written language you must learn (in our case) English. A deaf cuer is able to phonemically decode the written language in the same manner a hearing person would. This leads to better reading potential. We’ve also found that for Ray, it has improved his speech. Another advantage has been that cueing has improved Ray’s lip reading skills because part of the system relies on watching the lips of the person cueing. Consequently, when he is listening to someone who does not cue, and he does not have a Cued Language Transliterator, he’s better able to rely on his lip reading skills.