History
Visual Phonics was developed by Carol F. Hill, a mother of three hearing-impaired children. In 1982, Dorothy M. Hansen and Millie Snow were instrumental in getting this program incorporated into the Communication Arts, Inc. ICLI (International Communication Language Institute).
Visual phonics was created to help deaf children develop speech. Simple and effective, it can be used at home by parents and family members who are not professional speech therapists. Visual phonics is unique. It’s easily learned symbols closely resemble the act of producing each sound, thus enabling the child to make the association between the symbol and the act of making the sound.
Carol Hill has three deaf children. Knowing how bright and responsive her children were, she became frustrated when their speech and language skills were still minimal after several years of speech therapy.
Inspired by the story of Helen Keller, Carol felt that if a deaf and blind person
could attain high language expertise, then most deaf children ought to be able
to excel also. Her love for her own children motivated her to find a way to help
deaf children learn speech.
As she watched the speech therapist use his hand to get her child to make
certain sounds, a spark was struck. She went home and experimented with
“signs for sounds”. Within two weeks, her four-year old, severely deaf daughter
was sounding out words on cereal boxes.
Carol’s children made rapid progress. As Carol shared her methods with other
mothers of deaf children, she found that other children progressed just as
rapidly. One mother stated, “My daughter has learned more in one week using
this Visual Phonics method than she did in one year of speech therapy.”
With visual phonics, the children are able to correct their own pronunciation by identifying missing sounds. They could speech-read more easily because they could discriminate sounds to match the words.
How this program works:
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People learn what they know through their senses, primarily visual, kinesthetic, and auditory. The best way to teach people is to use the dominant learning sense and… “bridge” to the weaker senses.
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Frustration and failure are often compounded when the weak sense is emphasized. A blind child who was taught to read only through his weak visual perceptions would soon despair. But when a child is encouraged to use the senses that are developed best (touch and hearing for the blind child), and “bridges” are built to other senses and behaviors (reading for the blind child), the child learns happily and easily. Frustrations are minimized, and a new feelings of excitement and success become motivating.
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Visual Phonics provides the bridge to speech for a deaf child. It is visual, and deaf children are highly visually oriented. It is kinesthetic. What the child does with his/her hand represents what he/she should do with the mouth to produce the sound.
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Children who have difficulty producing and remembering correct production of sounds in conversation are easily frustrated when they are not understood. Visual Phonics prompts are “tools” that can help the child “see” the sounds in words… especially those sounds he/she has difficulty producing. As the child learns the correct production of particular sounds, paired with the hand prompts, he/she increases the awareness of using correct placements/uses of lips, tongue, throat, or teeth.
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Given the consistent prompts for the individual sounds, the child is able to learn the correct productions and transfer this learning to be able to correctly produce sounds in more words.
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When parents learn and use these same prompts, they are able to help their child practice correct sounds in common words used at home, in the car, with grandparents, etc. Learning and using correct sounds becomes a natural experience, when Visual Phonics is used.
*Excerpt is slightly paraphrased from Carol F Hill's book, printed by Communications Art Inc.
ICLI 1982
