Support by Hearing Parents to Deaf Learners in Sign Language Acquisition

Abstract

There has been a significant improvement in Deaf education that have occurred in the last century. Despite this improvement, deaf learners continue to face significant obstacles in their daily lives. The findings revealed that support obstacles by hearing parents to Deaf learners in sign language acquisition were enhanced by being born in a hearing family who does not have a background in sign language. In South Africa, deafness is often diagnosed only when a child is between the ages of four and eight. In most cases, a child's language capacity develops during the first two years of life. deaf children enter their first grade at a school for the Deaf with little to no sign language skills. Most deaf children of hearing parents do not have or lack linguistic input at home. Thus, if hearing parents have a deaf child, they have to learn sign language to interact with their deaf children, and usually learn sign language at the same time as their deaf children. This study adopted a qualitative method using a descriptive case study as the research design. A purposeful sampling of six Deaf learners, and their six hearing parents was included in the study. The fact that signed language has been adopted as the 12th South African official language, is a good development for the deaf. There is a dearth and less research conducted, mostly international. It is of significant to investigate further to improve sign language acquisition to Deaf learners in South Africa.

Keywords: Deaf learners; South African Sign Language; challenges; hearing parent; non- native signer

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