A Student Of Two Disciplines -- A Deaf Girl In A Hearing World Finds She Must Master Two Languages As Different As Sound And Silence

Sophie-Shifra Gold sat very still, quieting her expressive fingers for a moment while she concentrated on her teacher's voice and lips.

"Why do you wear hearing aids?" asked Sherry Waddell, who teaches Sophie-Shifra's combination fourth/fifth grade class in North King County.

The 10-year-old lifted her slender hands and quickly traced out a complete English sentence, accompanied by her best effort at speaking: "I wear them to hear better."

Waddell beamed and congratulated the child, this time illustrating her spoken words with a string of 12 symbols in Signed Exact English.

"Good, Sophie-Shifra! Last year you couldn't answer that. Wow. Wow," said Waddell of Mountlake Terrace.

This is Sophie-Shifra's first year at Northwest School for Hearing-Impaired Children, the state's only private school for the deaf and hard of hearing. From age 3 through third grade, Sophie-Shifra was educated in the Seattle School District's program for the deaf, attending View Ridge Elementary.

The decision to send Sophie-Shifra to Northwest was a wrenching one because her divorced parents are at odds over how she should be educated. Her mother chose Northwest School for its strong emphasis on English. Her father opposes that program because it completely excludes use of American Sign Langauge, the conceptual language of the deaf.

A DEBATE OVER TEACHING

That family controversy mirrors a national debate as educators wrestle with century-old questions about teaching language to the deaf. A consensus is building that "total communication" methods in vogue since the '70s are failing; many deaf high school graduates still have the reading ability of third- to fifth-graders.

Total communication, which is common in public elementary schools and state schools for the deaf, uses a melting pot of sign languages - a bit of American Sign Language (ASL), a bit of Signed Exact English (SEE), and a lot of "pidgin sign," in which ASL and SEE signs are used to form ungrammatical English sentences, dropping words such as "the" and "a."

Two radical solutions are emerging at opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Both advocate teaching deaf children a single language and using that language to teach all school subjects. The deaf cultural community and growing number of state schools for the deaf advocate ASL as that primary language, while Northwest School has chosen English and its signed equivalent, SEE.

"We have found that a child that learns English early has a jump on academics," said Judy Callahan, who co-founded Northwest School nearly 10 years ago with Karen Appelman. "Our kids are on grade level, and that's almost unheard of in this country."

Northwest School is a cheerful place, and teachers and administrators are enthusiastic about their mission. Praise and building children's self-esteem are top priorities. Spirits are even higher this year because the school finally owns a building of its own after nine years of leasing space from Shoreline School District.

The school's ideal is to start with children at age 3 and give them a constant and consistent exposure to perfect English, always spoken and signed in complete sentences. SEE was created in recent decades by educators who created hand shapes to correspond with English grammar rules.

Students are tutored individually every day in speech, lip-reading and development of their hearing. Callahan and Appelman believe deaf children have an innate ability to speak intelligibly if their speech, listening and lip-reading training begins early. In addition, most of the older children are mainstreamed every day at King School, a nearby private school, where they take math and gym classes with their hearing peers.

When this year's group of 3-year-olds arrived in September, they spoke and signed in single words, said their teacher, Linda Brown. Now they can speak and sign the deaf alphabet, and they know enough Signed Exact English to compose simple sentences of their own.

Already they are required to use correct grammar. Last week, 3-year-old Patrick Tulley finished his speech lesson and returned to the group to tell another child it was her turn.

"Anna, go Brown," he said, using Anna's name sign followed by the SEE word for "go" plus Brown's name sign.

Teaching assistant Sherry Gould gently corrected him. "Go with Brown," she said, bringing her fists together, thumbs upward, to make the sign for "with." Patrick repeated his command, this time correctly.

Northwest School calls this the "again" policy, requiring children to correct their grammar mistakes. "Pidgin sign" creates bad grammar habits, and it has no place in school, the teachers say.

Callahan and Appelman met at the University of Washington, where they both earned master's degrees in deaf education. Then in the 1970s, they found themselves teaching in adjacent classrooms in the Edmonds School District.

"We had real similar beliefs and experiences about how much more you could expect from hearing-impaired children in terms of their speech and English," Callahan said.

`GREAT SUCCESS'

The two women wrote a curriculum for teaching English skills, which they used in their classes in the Edmonds district. Later they added auditory and lip-reading training to the curriculum and co-wrote a book, "Teaching the Hearing-Impaired Through Total Communication."

"What we found through the years was that we were having great success with those children that we taught, and we wanted a chance to try our own program where we could take a child from age 3 and move them all the way to sixth grade," she said.

So they launched a fund-raising campaign and founded Northwest School, which this year has a $697,255 budget. About 60 percent comes from donations and grants.

This year, the school has 46 children in preschool through sixth-grade classes.

Every morning, mini school buses from all over the region turn off Westminster Way North into a parking lot marked by the school's leaping dolphin logo. Fourteen school districts which lack programs for the deaf contract with Northwest, paying their $5,000-$6,000 yearly tuition.

Most deaf children in the region attend public programs in the Seattle, Edmonds and Highline school districts, but parents may request the Northwest program as an alternative.

"We left the public system because we wanted . . . consistent teaching, consistent discipline, consistent sign system, consistent expectations," Callahan said.

The ideal time and place for deaf children to learn American Sign Language is in high school, where they can learn it with their hearing peers, Callahan said.

However, many deaf advocates say ASL is the natural language of the deaf, and a part of their cultural heritage. Studies have shown language acquisition is easiest in childhood, and many deaf children who are not exposed to ASL until after adolescence never become fluent in it, said Delva Van Roekel, director of student life at the Washington School for the Deaf.

That happened to Janet Johanson, now executive director of the Community Service Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Seattle. Although her father and sister are deaf, she was not exposed to ASL until adulthood.

"I'm not that fluent in ASL, and it does affect my ability to work in the deaf community," she said, through an interpreter. "The philosophies are established by non-deaf people, and they have long-lasting affects on us."

English evolved over time as a hearing language, and its structure is fundamentally different than that of deaf languages that have evolved around the world. Deaf languages incorporate visual space and body language, and use a profoundly different sentence and grammar structure.

To a deaf child, signed English is an artificial language, Johanson said.

"It's like sending kids to school but only teaching them computer language," she said. "It doesn't enable them to communicate with the outside (deaf) world."

Sophie-Shifra's father, Dana Gold, is worried about that too. American Sign Language is like a "secret handshake" in the deaf world, he said.

He and Sophie-Shifra's mother, Wendy Marcus, have reached a compromise. Sophie-Shifra will attend Northwest School through eighth grade, and then she might attend high school at the Washington School for the Deaf in Vancouver, where she would be exposed to ASL and deaf culture.

Marcus expects Sophie-Shifra will someday prefer the company of other deaf people, and that's fine with her. But she wants to ensure the girl is equally comfortable in the hearing world.

"My daughter in particular I think is very well-suited for Northwest School, and all kids probably aren't," Marcus said. "She has very good verbal skills, she opens her mouth and talks. She's very comfortable interacting with hearing people."

Callahan stressed it's all a matter of choice. Parents choose Northwest so their children will have more choices in their adult lives, she said.

"Everybody has to go with what they believe is right within them. Karen and I have chosen something we believe is right. It's right for these kids, because it's working," she said.