Friday, February 16, 2007

KODA learn better in ASL?



Working with her Koda daughter, Jay Krieger observed that it appears that kodas learn better in ASL.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jay!

You must be realized that your third daughter must have involved with you and your entire family all of her life. That is a huge difference. I find this very interesting. She must be very fortunate to have you and your family. :-)

Many cases like this are not very often.

White Ghost

Anonymous said...

Your story is inspiring! You know, there are not many deaf folks like that to their hearing children... What a shame! From what I have encountered numerous CODA, their attitudes seem to be as if they treat their folks(and other deaf people)as inferior, undereducated, weird, or nothing at all... Maybe that is because they are tired of helping their folks while growing up. But it is interesting to know that many CODA end up as full-time or part-time terps at many schools and colleges across America, and most of them are excellent signers. Mostly, they are without a need of RID certification!

Nowadays, there seem be a growing number of deaf folks who are able to tutor their hearing children on various subjects. I am glad to see more of these hearing children learning something directly from their well-educated deaf folks.

By the way, you are one of the best thinkers in the blogshpere/vlogsphere, and I enjoy your signing. Yours is always clear and concise. Yes, I am deaf myself, too.

Fred

Anonymous said...

You must have done a very good job of explaining things to her when you worked with her yesterday so she felt relieved so she is lucky to have you as her father. There is some talk about Maryland School for the Deaf opening doors to koda children, I asked some parents if they would consider sending their children there. They said, "no way, Maryland School for the Deaf will be awfully too easy for them and that they would be bored there", however their curriculm is the same as Maryland public schools. I found this very interesting. I also think Deaf parents need to bring more deaf cultural/sign language/pride to their koda children so that they will be proud of their heritage and be eager to get more involved. In my previous post, someone criticized that we should teach our children ASL and not to let them fingerspell too much, I found this very informative.

Anonymous said...

Interesting to see what you have to say about CODA learning. I am CODA myself, and I found as I was growing up through school, and still now, I will interpret the English I hear to sign in my head.
From what I have learned in life and some courses I took in University, it may be that as CODA, we learn ASL as our first language, and English as our second.
We learn both almost simultaneously, but because we communicate primarily with our parents in sign, that is the foundation that we build our language on. Even when we begin to use English more (because it is easier), our brain is still wired to think in sign.

Anonymous said...

1. I do agree that hearies miss out. They are too focused on their hearing that they forget about using their eyes. Nothing wrong with using their hearing if they are able to do so but eyes can be a valuable tool.

2. In my graduate program, I've read about research about ASL preschool classes where there is a mixture of deaf children and KODAs. Everybody benefits - deaf children of hearing parents benefits from being around deaf children of deaf parents and KODA because of their more developed fluency in ASL. Hearing parents benefits from meeting each other and observing how Deaf parents are able to function as adults and how they are able to maintain close relationships with their children. This tell hearing parents that their deaf children will be ok learning ASL. Deaf of deaf parents and KODA, deaf parents benefits by being exposed to hearing values and cultures. Also, their children have a larger pool of ASL-using playmates to draw from. In the end, everybody learn and respect both cultures and children are more likely to become proficient in both ASL and English... true bilingual-bicultural persons.

3. Based on what you shared from your daugther's comments, it's shame that her teacher is not using her/his students' latent curiousity to learn from each other. In large classroom like 25 students, research shows that students learn best from each other. The teacher could have set up her classroom to be student-centered and use cooperative learning approach where the teacher introduce lesson content and have a series of activities where students can work together and learn from each other then they all reflect on what they have just learned and apply to what is being taught.

Anonymous said...

That's a really good question. Looking back on my own history, I was the solitary mainstreamer in an all hearing school.

A majority of the subjects and topics covered at the time required me to really think about what the real picture was. I didnt have an interpreter at the time and a lot of it was through forced lip-reading.

I strongly feel that I could have obtained a much broader understanding had I had the RIGHT kind of communication instead of wracking my brain trying to sort out the misunderstandings.

Codadiva said...

As a CODA, I am also a visual learner. It's amazing to me those that are hearing that learn better with audio. I'm sure your daughter relates to the visual learning.

Great Story!

Lisa
http://codadiva.wordpress.com