Hello Monika,

Do you mean learning the language in its aural form or its printed form? If you desire to know more about acquisition of Chinese orthography by deaf & hard of hearing children, you might want to get in touch with Gabrielle Jones. She has work in progress in this area. She might also be familiar with some of the practices of teaching spoken Chinese to deaf & hard of hearing children as well.

http://www.bu.edu/sed/about-us/faculty/profiles/gabrielle-jones/

If you did not , have a look at such simple explanation and maybe you may progress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Mandarin_Chinese

Http://www.ehow.com/video_4537713_chinese-symbols-death.html

I mean spoken Chinese, even though writing characters is also very interesting topic. Thank you a lot Clifton, I'll try to contact her. Osmar thank you too for help.

Misunderstandings are quite normal, once what I tried to point out is the use of the characters ( written ones ) in order to show up the different oral devices of the Chinese spoken language . ma, ma , ma , ma g.expl. . Hope you got it.

"Hard of hearing" is a rather vague term, so a possible answer to your question is, "It all depends." There are many different acoustic properties associated with tonal distinctions, some of which might be discriminable by those "hard of hearing." First one needs to determine what the acoustic cues are for tonal features and then determine whether the particular "hard of hearing" individual can learn to discriminate at least some of them.

Monika: I have no personal experience of what you ask, but I presume that difficulties in teaching and acquiring lexical tones would be similar to those in teaching and acquiring certain consonants, particularly fricatives, among the hearing-impaired. See for example this study about the production of sibilants:

http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/14944996/sibilant-production-speakers-who-have-hearing-loss-electropalatographic-perceptual-evidence

And this one about Mandarin-speaking children with congenital deafness:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1976600/

Deaf speakers may compensate, in production, for what is present in speech-acoustic signals (frequency, amplitude, and so on) but they cannot perceive. Here is a report on these matters:

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/20406/

Perhaps one way of teaching lexical tones (and sibilants) to hearing-impaired users goes through the teaching of compensatory strategies which may enhance the intelligibility of these users to hearing interlocutors, while not necessarily matching the production of hearing users?

Madalena

There are data showing that some children with profound deafness can become bilingual in two spoken languages. However, this is predicated on the kids having access to conversational sound, usully with the use of effectively mapped cochlear implants. This access to sound is especially critical for children who learn a tool language such as Chinese.

well you can either try and explain to them how to move their speech organs, or let them naturally adjust with practice. It all depends on how their particular situation is, I'm having difficulties in teaching proper Romanian pronunciation to Chinese people. Inevitably you will have great difficulty in that area. What you should do is know your pupils well see what generalities you find between them spot the worst areas and work with them discover the best way to make yourself heard by them.

I am aware from personal experience of how useful diagrams can be of the teeth/tongue positions for specific sounds and also the use of hand signals by the teacher that show the tones in terms of rise and fall with large gestures while she refers to the pinyin with tone markings alongside the character. Teaching the concept of voice pitch quite explicitly with definition of what this is and why it is so important in Chinese using examples of variants say of ma+tone1234 helps, as does using short contrastive phrases of musical notes along with the symbolic notation. They need the concept of pitch as well as the auditory experience before they can produce it, but this should be no harder than for tone-naive English speakers, many of whom in my classes can't even hear it let alone reproduce it-- a matter of developing critical listening skills.

The acquisition of phonemic pitches (tones) is a hard task for students with normal hearing. So when you think of teaching tones to hard of hearing subjects, your task is drastically amplified. If I may ask: Your students cannot hear (by my understanding), how would they benefit from the course? You might want to find out if the language is available in sign language. One point I would like to point out is that tone language speakers speak their language without knowing that they use tones. They are not conscious of tones just as naive speakers of non-tone languages are not conscious of phonemes. They just express ideas with words naturally. Tones, phonemes, intonation etc are all jargon of the linguist of which the naive native speaker knows nothing about. I was conducting a tone identification experiment using naive native speakers of the language. They knew nothing. So Tone 1, 2, 3 etc is all nonsense to them. To help them identify the tones, I used musical notes as a guide. They were asked to identify the pitches presented as either DO, RE MI for Low, Mid and High tones, respectively. That is for subjects with normal hearing. If your subjects are hard of hearing, sign language could be your last resort. You are the researcher so you have to do some homework yourself and thereby acquire knowledge through personal experience.

I have no experience teaching a tonal language. However, I do have experience with oral deaf children and children with profound hearing loss who were oral. With the improvement in cochlear implantation, children with significant hearing loss to children who are deaf, can learn an oral language in ways comparable to their hearing peers. If fitted early enough (before age 2 years) and provided the appropriate early intervention with an audiologist, teachers of the Deaf, speech-language pathologists and others, the children often acquire oral language skills comparable to their hearing peers. The best resource in the United States for information regarding language-learning in hard-of-hearing and deaf children would be Gallaudet University, www.gallaudet.edu. I would hypothesize that hard of hearing children could, indeed, learn Chinese if there were no co-occurring issues like significant mental retardation or motor disability. I am assuming that you are speaking of children whose parents' first language was Chinese, and the preferred language of the home was Chinese.

We seem to be trying to answer this question without considering the requirements of the question. The original question addresses the case of persons with hard of hearing. For example, if a short-sighted person wears glasses and can see properly, his sight problem is no longer an issue when it comes to visual capacity. So, teaching that person is no longer a case of teaching a blind person. Similarly, if a hard of hearing person wears cochlear implant and can hear, that person cannot be considered as hard of hearing from the standpoint of language pedagogy. The point I raised earlier above relates to the task of teaching audio signals to persons with hearing problems. If the children's L1 is Chinese and they can hear by wearing cochlear implant I do not see the problem because you do not have to teach tones to them - they acquire them naturally. If the students are learning as L2, the best method is the signifier/signified (sound/word to object) in which they will pick up the tones without you having to teach them. It is important to know that you are trying to help people speak another language rather than trying to produce linguists.

Akpan, thank you for raising additional insights. I would suggest we consider the fact that visually impaired is not the same as legally blind, vs. blind and so forth. So it is with hard-of-hearing and Deafness. There si a continuum. Further, when the cochlear implant is not working, the person is Deaf, as a Deaf specialist pointed out to me. Further, not all Deaf people are able to be fitted with Cochlear Implants. If the Deaf Person's first language is sign language, and if they are not fitted with a Cochlear implant, the chances are reduced that a tonal language could be acquired.

Forgive my typos in the previous post. Correction: ...There is a continuum...See the fourth line.

Hi Nola. Thanks for your observation. Call it continuum, degree of impairment, severity ..., it does not alter the point I was making. This is no reason to introduce multi-dimensional methods into resolving a uni-dimensional problem. You might want to look again at the original question; it regards method to teach tones (pitched audio speech signals) to hard of hearing.individuals. If someone can correct a hearing problem by wearing cochlear implant, that individual is no longer considered as hard of hearing in audio perception. The analogy I made was to seeing. If one can correct a sight problem by wearing glasses, the individual cannot be regarded as blind. Even among normal of hearing individuals, a simple test will tell that not all of us have the same acuity. So where does continuum come in if teaching a class of individuals. Does the teacher have to speak at different volumes so as to reach each student? No, The students can all hear and so the teacher speaks normally regardless of individual differences. And please, above all things, you do not need an expert to tell you that an individual who uses hearing aid cannot hear if his/her apparatus is not working.

Hi, Akpan, Thanks for your follow-up so that I might clarify my comment. I am suggesting in my response that a hearing loss may vary from mild to profound. Therefore, those with hearing loss may have some perception of some pitches, dependent upon their degree of hearing loss. Dependent on the severity of the hearing loss, the perception of many to all of the tones may be affected. I do apologize if my use of the term "continuum" was not clear earlier. I am not suggesting that the teacher speak at different volumes. I am suggesting that there is variety among individuals with hearing loss and that the technology can be used to correct the hearing so that differences in perception among different individuals would not interfere with instruction--even if the instruction was perception of tonal pitches associated with Chinese. I restricted my examples to individuals fitted with cochlear implants. I did understand your example of wearing glasses to correct vision. Yes, we agree that a hearing screening will reveal differences in hearing among individuals with normal hearing. Specifically, individuals with normal hearing would be expected to have some variation in the threshold of detection, as I understand it, as measured in decibels. So, a pitch or tone would have to be at a certain loudness level before it could be detected. To conclude, I was not suggesting the teacher speak at different volumes. My response does imply (though not discussed in my earlier post) that the cochlear implant would need to be checked regularly to determine if it is working properly so that the individual can perceive whatever the stimulus of concern.

Dear Nola,

Thank you for taking the time to patiently explain your point to me. I really appreciate it. Nevertheless, in scientific research, when we want to tackle a problem, we present the problem and formulate a hypothesis. Following the formulation of a hypothesis, we establish a methodology, laying out how the problem is to be approached. The approach must be within the framework of the problem. Anything outside it is an introduction of a multidimensional process in the hope to resolve a uni-dimensional issue. In the case at hand, it is given that the potential students in question had been assessed and qualified as HARD-OF-HEARING. Thus, the question focused on How to teach tones to these individuals. There are teaching methods to address the problem with the result that your introduction of the degree of severity and hearing loss fell wide of the subject because the question did not ask to know how to make people hear so that they can learn tones. It is therefore counter-productive to raise issues that steer a discussion outside its framework. I thank you for your understanding. With this I draw the line under this exchange.

Hi Monica,

being at the same point with Nola,

I'd like to suggest that not only the severity of hearing loss may be taken in those kind of research but personal/individual ability to learn foreign/second languages as well (so many factors...).

First of all it's better to state what do you mean "teach" and "language".

It's quite a joke, but IMHO you can always teach... the question is if the students will learn/learn succisevly :)

Still the second point is in my interest (touched in my research):

if you define langage as phonic act, you' d to specify your effects as "students speaking oraly and phonically".

According to de Saussure - parole.

But if you define what is to be taught as "langue" you'll have to consider students' first language:

If it's phonic, e.g. polish, the hearing loss is to be considered as well as individual students' ability to learn different languages (and much more considerable factors making some people sucdessfull in learning foreign/second languages especially marking the level of tone usage compared with hearing students' achievements in this area).

Thus if student's first language is polish sign language, you'll be able to discover how easily those people learn languages of similar gramatical structure. Just one and basic point: you'll never be able to learn this (and check teaching results), if the teacher of Chinese is not native polish sign language user (that's the real problem in fact). You'd be able to find in this group students of different hearing loss but of one first language structurally similar to Chinese. That's the amasing field of comparison I think.

What comes really interesting to me is the last idea I pointed out:

there is a point to check how do users of structurally different and similar languages learn Chinese,

but, sorry, it makes no sence, in my opinion, in searching how much impairement impaires impaired (people with hearing loss).

Exp: you don't search ability of short people in playing basketball.. why do you search how not (well) hearing people hear (tones)?

If you are focused on CI users - you just check how the hearing aid (CI) is capable in "bringing people back to hearing". Thus you check just only the validity of CI. Is that tha point of your interest?

regards

Justyna Kowal

BTW

CI users are regularly "serviced" so it's audiologists' task. If not - your research would be only jus how do regular CI servising influence students abilities of learning tone languages.

Dear Justyna,

thank you very much for your valueable contribution to my question. When it comes to the point of doing such research...I'd rather say that it's a matter of breaking barriers...if my students with hearing loss want to try to learn some Chinese why wouldn't I make an attempt to find the right tools to help them? (e.g. nobody asks what's the point of dancing competition for people on a wheelchairs, but still it's quite poplular and helps..I hope you see my point)

Best wishes

Monika Malec

Hi, Monica, best wishes with your students. I enjoyed Justyna's insights as well. I agree with you that the question you pose is one of breaking barriers. Why not provide hard of hearing students an opportunity to learn any language chosen? In this case, the subject was Chinese.

I made a comment on this subject before and I still stand by it. It appears that this question is mixing two issues in one. The first issue would be, 1) How to make hard-of-hearing subjects hear again. And the second would be: 2) How to teach Chinese to hard-of-hearing subjects. By decomposing the problem as shown, each stage can be treated according to its requirements.

In the first case, the answer is simple: Get hearing aid for your subjects, which could be CI. Once you get your subjects to use CI and can hear, you are no longer looking at teaching language to hard-of-hearing subjects because the subjects are now able to hear by means of CI. Normal language teaching method would apply.

Concerning option 2: If you cannot get your subjects onto CI, then use a system of sign language. As far as scientific progress can go, there are no alternatives outside these two options. If Monica is still wondering about what to do after all the helpful hints provided, she might have interests that are outside the objective that she has declared.

Speech perception is partly visual as we know from research in auditory-visual speech perception. We use lip and face movements as well as auditory information and the use of visual information is robust when it comes to impoverished listening conditions be it noisy environments or being hard of hearing. Being congenitally deaf is perhaps a different story. Some preliminary work about a decade ago by Burnham and colleagues apparently had shown that visual information is not as robust in tonal languages as in non-tonal languages and given the dominance of tonal information in conveying lexical meaning teaching hard-of-hearing students a tonal language may be feasible; however, it would probably be more challenging to teach those with congenital deafness. Re teaching Ss with hearing aids there is some research on how they perceive music but in terms of tonal L2 acquisition, I'd need to do some literature review. It smells like an interesting topic to investigate.

Dear Monika

I'm a speech and language pathologist and I had some patients who had hearing loss (in different levels) , most of them could progress in spech and language even I could teach some degrees of tonal speech to them but it's so difficult for them to understand tone in speech because it's a coceptual issue and the level which such patient can progress in it related to the degree of hearing loss.

Kind regards,

Nazila Sandoughdar

If someone is genuinely hard of hearing and not deaf, they can probably learn to distinguish among tones. In a tonal language, all (ha!) you need is RELATIVE rather than absolute tone differences, so if you go a lot higher in a rising tone rather than only a little bit higher, you will still be understood, though you might sound strange. But as another poster mentioned, deaf and hard-of-hearing people may have other problems in their speech that could interfere with comprehension. As a linguist who has worked with deaf people for 40+ years (studying, I hasten to say, sign languages, and only tangentially working on speech) and who has spent time in Chinese-speaking countries, trying to learn some Mandarin, for me the bigger problem has been hearing rather than producing tone differences. One question that I think hasn't been raised in other comments is whether we're talking about a child being raised in a place where a tone language is used vs. say a college student from another country who is learning the language in a classroom. Depending on the situation, there can be different answers to your query.