• Deaf people have a number of problems with reading and writing.kid can't hear image by Daria Miroshnikova from Fotolia.com
  
  The deaf community encounters many problems in teaching the hearing impaired or the hard of hearing to read and write, according to deaf-culture-online.com. The reasons vary as to why this difficulty exists, and many explanations exist about why the deaf have such trouble learning these skills.
  
  

Teaching

• In the United States, people learn to read and write primarily through spoken language. Children learn to take the language they speak, and convert it into symbols. The deaf (especially those who were deaf from birth or who lost their hearing early in life) may have never learned spoken words. This means that you can't use normal methods to teach deaf people to read and write, since phonetics and similar teaching tools become useless.
  
  

ASL

• ASL (American Sign Language) should not be held responsible for the deaf community's illiteracy problem, according to "Anything But Silent"; Mark Drolsbaugh; 2004. However, it can be difficult to teach English to a deaf person whose primary language is ASL; it is as if you're trying to teach English to someone whose primary language is not English. The deaf person must learn to read and write English. In order to do this, you'll also need a teacher who knows ASL.
  
  

Space and Cost

• Since the 1500s, generations of educators have tried to teach the deaf to read and write, but there has been little success. Modern approaches do show promise, however, especially those that treat deafness language education as a total language course. In this method, the instructors teach the deaf person English in the same way they would teach English to a hearing person whose first language is Spanish or Japanese. However, demand exceeds supply for this type of language instruction, and these courses are very expensive.