Growing up deaf in Ireland

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to describe my own linguistic experience at school and by doing so provide a general understanding of the linguistic experience of Irish Deaf children during the period that oral education was introduced into Irish schools for deaf children. The dissertation is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, I argue that the medical view has been the dominant view and that oralist theory and practice is based on a view of this kind. I argue that in a cultural understanding of deafness, an educational programme is bilingual; it includes the language of hearing society but gives the key role to sign language. Chapter 2 describes developments in the teaching of language to deaf people. The teaching of language to deaf people began with the view that it was possible for them to learn, and that vision and writing could be substituted for hearing and speech. In the early years of the 19th century the dominance of signing was due to the influence of de I'Epee in promoting public education for deaf children. By the end of the century, a powerful movement to assimilate deaf people into hearing society had developed. Chapter 3 describes the development of oralism in Ireland in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In oralist theory and practice, language meant spoken language and signs were regarded as a barrier to the acquisition of oral skills. As a result, segregation became a characteristic feature of Irish schools - segregation or oral pupils from pupils who were taught signs and segregation of hard-of-hearing pupils from deaf pupils. Chapter 4 examines oralist theory and practice in some detail through an analysis of my own school experience of oralist education. The complex process of education was reduced to speech training. The development of intellectual social and moral abilities became subordinate to auditory training and the production of speech sounds. Oralist practice left a void that deaf pupils filled by communicating in sign language among ourselves. Although we did not have access to signing models during our early years, by the time we entered secondary school we were fluent signers within our own school community. Chapter five contains the general summary and conclusions of the study.