A technique to teach a deaf student

It is a difficult job to teach a student who is deaf by birth. But if his basics (or schooling) are strong, the impediments can be managed. Here we will consider a deaf child of age around 14. For instance, if you have to teach him that Mr. X was born in London, we can explain him through giving his own examples. Let us suppose the student name is Y.

We can say:

a)      You/Y are from Karachi which is a city.

b)      Similarly, Mr. X is from London which is also a city.

Now the student knows that London is a city.

We can further explain by saying:

a)      Karachi is a city of Pakistan which is Y’s hometown

b)      Similarly, London is a city of England which the hometown of Mr. X.

As explained earlier that the basics of the student should be strong. Here, we are considering a child of 14 years. So, chances are that he will know that Karachi is the name of his city and Pakistan is the name of his country.

We can also teach him something new by explaining him the difference. For instance, we know that our child goes to school. So, in order to explain him “Vice Chancellor of the University” we need to say:-

a)      You/Y studies in a school. College is bigger than a school. But University is even bigger than a college.

b)      Y has a teacher in his school. Principal is bigger then his teacher. But vice-chancellor is even bigger then the principal.

c)      Principal is to a school and vice-chancellor is to a university.

This can help in clearing the concepts and understanding the status and authority of a vice-chancellor of a university.

As a teacher, if you yourself are a student of some university then you can even use this fact to your advantage and say:

You (Y) are a student of school and I am a student of a university.

This will further clear his concepts.

The child may possibly confuse London with Lahore. The reason here is their ability to spell a word. We will later on discuss why they do get confuse while spelling a word. But this inability will result in confusing one word with another (like Lahore and London) and miss spelling (like writing Teet instead of Tree). These confusions with spellings should be corrected at once and the teacher should ask the student, and his parents to help him, practice. Practice is very important for learning because it is very difficult for these children to retain what was taught.