Sharon Said:

Can anyone recommend me a "Learning to read/speak/write English" book for Vietnamese speakers?

We Answered:

can try becoming legal

Eleanor Said:

what problems do sign language users face when learning to read English?

We Answered:

I grew up hard of hearing and have become progressively deaf. I was fortunate in learning English in those formative years. But the experience of someone who grew up deaf is very different.

The first thing to understand is that the printed word is a encoding of the auditory word. People do not learn their first or native language by first experiencing it in print. Print literature represents an auditory language. Native users of the language represented in print literature must learn to decode the printed word, using their native abilities.

People who have grown up deaf without direct auditory access to the dominant language are at a disadvantage. They will learn to read and write the dominant language (if they do) as a second language. Their ability to do so will be much stronger if they have a strong, solid language foundation. American Sign Language can give them that.

I recommend reading "Raising and Educating a Deaf Child" by Marc Marschark. It is available at Amazon. Visit Marc's website. I have used in text in teaching about these issues.

Ken

Georgia Said:

What problems do deaf people come by when trying to learn to read and write in English ( or native language?)?

We Answered:

Here is a blog a deaf person wrote about this. It might help. http://welchsasl.blogspot.com/2007/02/is…