Book reviews

TEACHING MATHEMATICS TO DEAF CHILDREN

Terezinha Nunes, Whurr Publishers, 2004, 190pp, £19.50, ISBN 1 86156 340

The stated aim of this book is to share with parents and teachers of deafchildren the results of research into how deaf children think and how theylearn to solve numerical problems. Whilst there is an appreciation of the difficulties deaf children have in learning an oral language, there is a lack ofawareness of the obstacles they also face in learning mathematics.

The introduction states that whilst some deaf children achieve at age-appropriate levels in mathematics, many perform at a level lower than theirhearing peers, particularly in arithmetic and problem solving. Nunes believesthat we need to understand how children solve problems and learn mathe-matics in order to appreciate the difficulties faced by deaf children and to helpthem to overcome these.

In chapter two Nunes suggests that deaf children start to fall behind withcounting at pre-school level because of difficulties in sequential recall andbecause they lack the experience of their hearing peers in the use of counting.This lack of experience in the day-to-day use of mathematical conceptsappears throughout the text. Teachers of the deaf need to systematically teachthose things which hearing children learn incidentally.

Chapters three, four and five look in detail at the specific areas of mathe-matical difficulty which all teachers of the deaf will recognize, namelyproblem solving in all four mathematical operations and the use and appli-cation of money (linked to a delay in understanding the concept of units ofdifferent size).

Whilst deaf children have problems with sequential presentation and serialrecall they are better at spatial and visual coding. Nunes gives practicalsuggestions as to how to use these skills by giving a graphic and pictorialsystem for presenting mathematical problems.

The final chapter analyses the positive effects of the interventionprogramme in which drawings, diagrams tables and graphs were used toharness the information processing strengths of deaf children to use them astools for thinking and communicating about mathematical problems.

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I found this book very readable and a useful tool for teachers of the deaf. Ifound myself nodding in agreement at descriptions of the difficulties facedwhen simple number operations were put into a problem format. I wanted tothank Nunes for her comments that these difficulties are not a reading andlanguage understanding problem and that keyword lists do not help. I likedthe practical nature of the book; the inclusion of samples of the pictureworksheets used and particularly the way graphs and tables were used assupport in multiplication and division problems. The last chapter of the bookseemed rather hurried and lacked the detail included in some of the earlierchapters. I was however left with a desire to see a continuation of theresearch applying the techniques to work with older KS2 and KS3 pupils.Such techniques might move away from pictures to using other types ofgraphic representation or mental imaging to solve mathematical problems.

Reviewed by Janet HallHead of Primary Department, Royal School for the Deaf, Derby DOI: 10.1002/dei.13

DEAFNESS IN MIND: WORKING PSYCHOLOGICALLY WITHDEAF PEOPLE ACROSS THE LIFESPANEdited by Sally Austen and Susan Crocker, Whurr Publishers, 2004, 359pp,£45, ISBN 1 86156 404 X

This book gives an overview of different psychological theories that could beused when working with deaf children and adults. Edited by two clinicalpsychologists and at a price of £45 you might expect a medical textbook;however, the content is not as high-powered as might be expected and by theend you will understand a great deal more about the different psychologicalapproaches.

The wide range of contributors includes medical practitioners working in themental health field; interpreters, speech and language therapists and linguists.The book is divided into four parts: Introducing Deafness; Psychological ModelsApplied to Deafness; Deafness and Mental Health and New Developments inPsychology and Deafness. The book is easy to dip into but it is also readablefrom cover to cover as the content is interesting and gives a great deal of foodfor thought for practitioners and anyone working in the d/Deaf world.

The first chapter expects people working in this field to understand social,political, economic and historical issues that affect d/Deaf people. Austen andColeman explain different models of deafness; debate whether deaf people aredisabled or not and look at the oral/manual debate. The second chapter‘Newborn Hearing Screening: the Screening Debate’, written by Hind,describes the programme but also gives arguments against it. Chapters 3(Graham), and 4 (Acker and Crocker) look at medical and physiologicalaspects of deafness and technology.

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