Imagine an English lesson in an elementary school.
Everyone seems to be clapping and singing along, even nodding in the right places.
They all repeat the words the teacher is saying. Even the child with a comparatively mild hearing loss seems to be “with it”.
That is, until you discover that the child believes that the word sandwich begins with the letter k…
Can you guess what he believes the words “avocado” and “helicopter” now begin with?
Take one minute and eleven seconds to watch the following video and learn more! It really happened!
Actually, as for the first case (K sound of a synonym in the student’s L1 /KARIX/ כריך instead of S for Sandwich may be related to a common replacement of words that share the same semantic field. Both Sandwich and כריך represent the same picture that he sees. BTW, it’s a common phenomenon we see when dyslexics name an object, and they do so by retrieving its synonym (a word from the same semantic field). Thanks for sharing! #whisper2reading
Thank you, Hagit, for that important comment!
I’d also add that the H/A replacement is quite common, not only among the hearing-impaired but also in other languages. We can relate to Hebrew, for example, where the H and A (letter HEY- Voiceless Glottal Fricative and ALEPH- Glottal Stop) are often pronounced/articulated the same, hence students write them as they hear them. They are called homophones, and marked as “phonetic spelling errors”. I don’t think that this one has to do with being hearing disabled. It seems more like a case of Dyslexia. Also, spelling words exactly as they sound is a widespread phenomenon in English due to the gap between its orthography (spelling) and phonology (sound). It requires “ear training”, so it’s probably not feasible with hearing-impaired, and it’s actually quite syziphic with dyslexics. Hebrew shows the same phenomenon as in “Avocado” and “/E/licopter”). I’d follow the pattern to see if there are repetitions of the same pattern, and try to track and categorize them. Amongst dyslexics, this switch of H/A (in Hebrew (Aleph/ Hey א/ה ) is again, very typical and prevalent and well documented in research.
Thanks again for pointing out very relevant info. This slideshow was designed to raise teachers awareness of different ways a hearing loss manifests in class. Thank you Hagit!