Writing with hearing impairment

For a year, I've tutored a writer who grew up hearing impaired. The experience reaffirms my belief that grammar and spelling, while necessary for the craft, are not an indicator of whether someone can write. My student's novel includes well-developed characters, a good sense of timing, interesting conflict, and realistic dialogue. Yet his hearing impairment has affected his writing, and in his education he was held to a different standard than other students. Now, on his own and through his creative writing, he explores grammar and spelling issues in his work. Here is what I've learned as his tutor. 1) Sit to his side with the better ear so he can hear; it is not impolite to ask which side is preferable. 2) Read aloud, enunciate well, and yet read at a normal speed. 3) Sound-alike words cause more problems than usual; whereas any student might misspell threw/through, my hearing-impaired student also confuses as/has/and because they sound the same to him. When correcting these, focus on how the word is used in the sentence: This should be 'and' because it combines things, and here 'has' is part of the action while 'as' starts a descriptive phrase. 4) Read ahead a few paragraphs to understand the content of the story before discussing grammar. This way I learn what he intends to communicate story-wise and then we discuss how the sentences can better achieve his goals. 

What to do if your eyes skip lines of text...

A student of mine struggled to transfer corrections he had made on his printed draft to his electronic version. Whenever he corrected a sentence, the electronic text would shift making it difficult for him to find other places in the document. To solve this issue, we stopped printing drafts and instead, worked together on his laptop; however, listening to him read his work aloud, I realized that he was skipping lines when he got to the right margin and moved his eyes to the left. This was the first time I encountered this disability: I now know two more people who deal with this reading problem. Another student holds a piece of paper under the line that she is reading and moves the paper down a fraction of an inch to view the next line. She does this when reading books and when reading a computer screen. Finally, a friend of mine went from a C average as an undergraduate to a A average in her master's program after investigating her diagnosis. She coped by highlighting her textbooks at the end of a line and the beginning of the next in one color, then changing between six colors for each ending/starting pair. This technique took a long time and her textbooks looked odd, but her grade point average soared and so did her confidence.

Reading by syllables

This year I had the privilege of helping someone learn to read phonetically (by syllables). We didn't set out with this goal in mind -- rather to complete homework and papers -- but to get those things accomplished, reading better was necessary. When we started working together, the young man struggled to read simple words like "paragraph" which he might start by saying "preg." Every sentence for him was a chore. I began covering up parts of words and asking what a smaller piece sounded like such as "par" or "graph." The young man didn't know the sound of some letter combos like "ph" and often confused the vowel sounds of e, a, and i (eh, aa, aw, uh, and ih). But he is a person who doesn't give up, and I have developed patience as a tutor. I learned to wait as he struggled through his guesses and memory. I learned to not supply words (until he got so exhausted that he couldn't continue). I learned that persistence is an amazing thing to watch. And after nine months, I watched the young man read six syllable words in a magazine, sounding them out until he recognized them like old friends in mysterious clothing.