Critical Literacy Skills In Deaf Children

Language acquisition, what is it? How does it promote Critical Literacy skills in Deaf children?

Language acquisitions is the process of procuring or adopting “a firmly established first language” (Mayer, 2007, p. 5). There is a direct correlation between the early acquisition of a language, and a child’s ability later in literacy, “linguistic competence” (Small & Cripps, 2003, p. 4), and other developmental and cognitive abilities. This critical time when a child should have access to his or her first language “takes place most naturally and successfully in the first few years of life” (Humphries et al., 2014, p. 34), and a child’s “early experiences [of language access] correlate with [his or her] competencies in language and literacy” (Mayer, 2007, p. 1). Optimal acquisition of language includes

3). The older a child gets, the more difficult it is for that child to acquire a first language as easily as in the earlier years of life. If a child is “linguistically deprived” (Humphries et al., 2014, p. 35), research has shown that greater problems will arise in the future with that child developing critical “mastery of numeracy and literacy […], and higher-order cognitive processing” (Humphries at al., 2014, p. 32).

It is imperative that a Deaf child is diagnosed early on in life, and given full access to his or her natural language (sign language) as early as possible to make sure that he or she can have access to language and communication which