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Deaf Community

In: Social Issues

Submitted By sm1904
Words 2151
Pages 9
"One out of 10 americans has more degree of hearing loss, and one out of every four hundered is profoundly deaf. Yet many hard-of-hearing which is a term used to describe mild to moderate hearing loss and deaf people in this country do not consider themselves handicapped. They do not believe their hearing loss makes them less- just different, and they look upon the deaf community as a sperate culture; as rich and diverse as that of the hearing world." (Turkingston, Sussman 4). The deaf community has had a continuing struggle with trying to maintain its integrity after all the years of misunderstanding and struggles with segregation. Althought, there have been many educators, linguistics and experts in the field of deafness, and hard of hrearing individuals have come a long way in order to ensure that the anomosity becomes cooperation, there is still many areas of controvery that have been left unsettled. We can continue to discuss with such struggles, but there would be a lot to cover and the misunderstandings could remain the status quo.Instead in this paper I will be focusing on the communication of the deaf with real life settings of the workplace, including communication with employers and hearing persons.

What exactly is it considered to be deaf?. Most of the deaf community do not accept the term " Hearing impaired" in some cases it can be even seen and taken as offensive. The terms " people who are deaf" "people who are deaf and hard of hearing" " deaf and hard of hearing people" " people with hearing loss" are terms which are widely preferred by the community ( Block & farb,1997). Since there is no real legal definition of deafness comparable to the legal definition of blindness, "deaf" and "deafiness" can have three possible descriptions: 1. Cannot hear and understand any speech. 2. Cannot hear and can understand speech. 3. Can hear little and understand

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