therefore need some other form of access to the printed word. It is these areas of book
use and publishing development that this article addresses.
Dual Language Signed and Written TextUntil the early 1980s most deaf children were taught using the oral method, which
meant signed language was not used in the classroom. As the majority of deaf children
learn language through observation not hearing, this meant that for many, their
language was severely underdeveloped even at the time they reached school-leaving age.
Often they left school with only functional reading and writing skills. A major change in
thinking and philosophy in the mid-1980s resulted in the introduction of ‘total
communication’—the use of spoken and signed language, lip reading, writing, body
movement, gesture—in combinations suited to the child and the moment. With the
introduction of signed language (the fourth largest indigenous language group in the
UK), these children were given a means of communicating on a level with their peers. It
meant that language could develop through sign as naturally as speech. Despite some
comments to the contrary, the use of signed language did not inhibit the development of
speech, in fact in some cases, speech was enhanced. In Australia a language programme
based on picture books has been developed expressly for deaf children (NSW 1990).
As a result of the introduction of ‘total communication’ many of these children were
beginning to communicate fluently at around the same time as hearing children, and a
need developed for the provision of materials which showed signed language in printed
form. To this end, the National Deaf Children’s Society, the Royal National Institute for
the Deaf, the NLHC and one or two publishers began looking at the problem. The result
was a series of five alphabet books by Beverley Mathias and Ruth Thomson in ‘Sign
supported English’, such as A to Z Food (1988), each based on a particular area of
understanding, and three picture books about two well-known children’s book
characters, Eric Hill’s Spot and John Cunliffe’s Postman Pat. Since then there have been
other successful publications which incorporate signed language. This opened up signed
language to hearing children, to the parents of deaf children and to the deaf children
themselves, who for the first time, saw their preferred means of communication written
in a book. Publishing in such a specialised area is a commercial risk, and deaf children
in Britain are not as fortunate as their counterparts in the USA. Through the publishing
company of Gallaudet University, Washington DC, which teaches through the medium
of signed language, American children have an ever increasing range of picture books
available in dual signed and written English. This level of publishing for deaf children is
not available in Britain. Other countries have also experimented with dual signed and
written texts, but in small quantities and low numbers of individual titles—examples are
the work of Lothian Publishing, Port Melbourne, Australia; and Aschehough in Oslo. As
the reading fluency of children using signed language has increased, so has their ability
to read print, so that today the dual-language books are used not only by deaf children
learning to read, but also by mainstream schools for support during the teaching of the
communication units within the British National Curriculum. An ever-increasing
number of deaf children are now reading print at or around the same level as hearing
children of the same chronological and educational levels.
638 PUBLISHING FOR SPECIAL NEEDS