2005-02-23 - Regarding learning

2005-02 - (February) Education
(From AllDeaf)
I'm Mous and I'm new on this forum. I have three kids, the eldest two are hearing, and I've got a wonderful daughter of 2 1/2 yrs old, that was born deaf. She got a bilateral cochlea-implant last october, and the sound was turned on in November. Our daughter just loves her CI. In the beginning, whenever she would hear a new sound, she would sign "listen!", and all of her face would radiate with pure joy, her whole being would lighten up with excitement.

I'm not writing to you because I want to start a discussion about whether or not to choose CI for children. Here in Norway where I live, that is not so much a discussion anymore. The Deaf community here is in general quite positive towards it, they don't think it will threaten their culture so much, but are aware that it will definitly change it.

However, the discussion going on in this country is about in which way these children should be educated. There is a big contradiction between to groups: one says the kids should only be taught speech (oral), versus an even bigger group that goes for a bilingual speech-development, i.e. Norwegian and Norwegian sign-language. (And there of course is the mixture of spoken language with sign as support, but I don't wish to categorize this as sign-language).
We have chosen for our daughter to be able to learn both languages, so that she later on in life can choose in which arena (hearing or Deaf) she wants to be.
I'm doing an education in sign-language at the university.In addition to that i follow a course that all parents of children with severe hearing-loss get, which is in all 40 weeks of sign-language tuition, over the course of 16 years (or until the child becomes 16). (Paid leave from work.)For the university education I'm writing a paper now, which is about belonging to different cultures (Deaf/hearing), whether this is possible, and what are important factors for a bilingual education to being successful. Lets face it, we do not want the child being half-competent in either of the two languages. Our goal is that the child becomes fluent in both. (In addition to that, we speak a third language at home, dutch).

My question is, are there any people who either have had an implant as a child and have grown up bilingual, or parents who chose an implant for their child and chose the bilingual education for their child in stead of only oral, and what are your experiences? I would love it if you would want to share that with me.
Mous