I am a mother of two profoundly Deaf children who have unilateral cochlear implants and have full access to NZSL as I am an interpreter and my husband is Deaf. My daughter, who is 3, has very strong spoken language skills and reasonably good sign language skills. I see her tendency is to use spoken language more dominantly. I want to know if there is any experience and research of educating children in both languages fluently and in what ways have been successful. I often use a form of sign-supported English when reading, but lately I notice she is not watching my signing. I have switched to separating the language and only using English or only using NZSL but when I just use NZSL she complains and wants me to use spoken English. I would love to have access to any literature in this area to help me navigate and teach 2 languages to my children.
Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any research literature about this issue. What we know from observations and teacher reports concerning students in our bilingual programs is that this situation is not at all unusual among deaf 5- and 6-year-olds with cochlear implants. At first, they seem to start using fewer signs productively themselves, and later they ask hearing and Deaf teachers to switch on their voices when communicating with them. Why? We don’t know. Our speculation is that this reflects some kind of an evolutionarily-determined drive for multimodal perception. However, we also don’t know whether this is a temporary situation or whether the children “grow out of it.” There clearly is a need to collect more observations by parents and teachers as well as to conduct systematic research on the issue which may have long-term implications for academic outcomes, social-emotional functioning, and cognitive development.
Knoors, H. & Marschark, M. (in press). Teaching deaf learners: Psychological and developmental foundations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Watson, L., Hardie, T., Archbold, S., & Wheeler, A. (2008). Parents’ views on changing communication after cochlear implantation. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 13, 104-116.