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Last week I visited a family who has a deaf child aged 11. The period of language deprivation he experienced was sadly seven years because of very late diagnosis, but he is a cognitively able child. When I greeted him, I asked if he was fasting. He said no but didn’t fully understand the sign for fasting. It was Ramadan during April this year, and his mother wanted me to explain fasting as he was going to join in for half the time each day. We looked at the calendar for Ramadan, and we had the times of sunrise and sunset from the local mosque website. We saw how two additional minutes were added to the morning and two to the evening each day as the days gradually lengthen in the spring. We counted the hours from sunrise to sunset and then divided them by two. That was how long he had to fast. He realised that the time would get longer through the month. He knows the word and sign breakfast and now understands more about fasting and breaking the fast. His mum wanted to explain why Muslims fast and explained it as giving money to poor people, especially in their home country. Her son wanted to know how the money could be sent in the post, maybe it wouldn’t be safe; this led to a discussion about electronic money transfer and different currencies.
This discussion was held in BSL, spoken English and Arabic, using other resources such as the calendar of sunrise and sunset and the kitchen clock, which displays prayer times. It illustrates the way science and maths talk at home is embedded in the family’s cultural context and that translanguaging practices often also include other semiotic resources. The conversation was an example of embodied cognition in that it involved attention to the clock and the table of sunrises and sunsets, a constant position in relation to where we were standing for sunrise and sunset, and moving round the room to check with concern about his grandmother back in the mother’s first country. These are the sorts of conversations that deaf children often miss out on because complex and deep conversations are often limited by a lack of parent confidence or lack of opportunities to learn and use a sign language or to develop spoken languages, including heritage ones. Background knowledge built up through in-depth conversation is crucial in school for making inferences in reading; mathematical problem-solving skills in school draw on real-life mathematical contexts like these.
We start this issue of Deafness & Education International with three articles relating to deaf children’s cognition.
In the first article by Jones, Chilton and Theakston, a pilot intervention took place with 14 parents of deaf children and 12 hearing children over 17 months. One group of parents received more in-depth videos to coach them on introducing science and maths talk with their preschool-age deaf children. Parents reported back by uploading diary entry videos. All parents in the study reported more science talk after the intervention, with no significant difference between the intervention and control. This study shows potential for further work looking at the quality and pattern of the science conversations in the home too, as the authors note.
Thom and Hallenbeck in the second article in this issue, conduct a systematic literature review about deaf children’s cognition in relation to spatial reasoning, mathematics and STEM. Mathematics, they argue, contains cultural conventions of numbers and shapes or objects arranged in space. The systematic review examines studies of spatial reasoning with deaf and hearing children. Few studies so far have investigated embodied cognition and spatial reasoning in deaf children. The authors urge teachers to provide more complex problem-solving mathematics contexts for deaf children, rather than the decontextualised over practising of arithmetic skills. Teaching spatial reasoning is important and likely to positively influence other mathematic skills. They end with a call for teachers of deaf children to spatialise the curriculum.
Sigal and Eden in the third article of the issue are interested in the ordering of events in storytelling with deaf children aged 7–11. They used an innovative method of virtual reality immersion in a mixed story sequence, from which the children created their own videos. There were 55 children in three groups: deaf children with hearing aids, deaf children with cochlear implants and hearing children. The deaf children could use spoken Hebrew or Israeli Sign Language for the storytelling activities. The deaf children with hearing aids made more progress over the eight weeks of the VR intervention than those with CIs. Regardless of the language level of the child, which in this study was only measured in relation to spoken language, using VR led to improvements in motivation to engage with sequencing in storytelling.
Journal notices
The next issue of Deafness & Education International will be the special issue edited by Dr Amy Szarkowski from Boston Children’s Hospital on pragmatics and deaf children. It promises to be an exciting issue.
I am stepping down as co-editor of Deafness & Education at the end of 2022. I have very much enjoyed the five years of co-editing the journal with Jill Duncan from Newcastle University, Australia. Our meetings are usually late at night or early in the morning but have always been positive. I have very much enjoyed interacting with reviewers and authors across the world. Jill will continue, but I now want to focus on establishing a new degree at the University of Edinburgh in primary education with British Sign Language. The call for a new co-editor is out now – see the journal home page for more information. The publisher Taylor and Francis is seeking a co-editor-in-chief with the confidence to engage with authors and researchers, strong organisational skills, and ability to work positively in a team with the editorial board.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Rachel O’Neill
Rachel O'Neill is a senior lecturer in deaf education at the University of Edinburgh. She co-edits Deafness & Education International.