Language Development in Deaf Children

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

As we near the tenth anniversary of the report of the Commission on Education of the Deaf (Bowe, 1988), I believe our foremost challenge is to accelerate language development among deaf children and youths. The commission's report has led to some real progress overall in education of deaf children and youths (see, for example, Bowe, 1991, and Bowe, 1993). Nonetheless, we face stubborn problems. In this article, I present my personal views, to which I welcome reader reaction, about what I believe to be the most important of these. The challenge of which I write here is not an issue that government can or should address. As I put it in my keynote address to the 57th Biennial Conference of the Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf (CAID)