WASHINGTON, D.C., USA, June 8, 2016 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Washington, DC – June 8, 2016 – Dr. Beverly Trezek will be the keynote speaker at the 50th Anniversary of Cued Speech Conference, July 8-10, 2016 in Falls Church, VA.

The conference is organized the National Cued Speech Association, an organization that advocates for increased literacy for deaf children through the Deaf Children’s Literacy Project.

Dr. Beverly Trezek is an Associate Professor of Literacy and Specialized Instruction, co-director of the Reading Specialist program, and Chair of the Department of Counseling and Special Education at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. She has recently completed research on the use of Cued Speech as compared to Visual Phonics.

Trezek is a 12-year veteran special education teacher and teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing in a K-12 public school setting. Her research focuses on reading instruction for beginning and struggling readers with a particular emphasis on investigating the role of phonemic awareness and phonics in literacy development for students with hearing loss.

Cued Speech was invented in 1966 by Dr. R. Orin Cornett, a physicist who was surprised by the low literacy rates for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. He became Vice President for Long Range Planning at Gallaudet, where he focused his attention to resolving the literacy issue. His solution was Cued Speech, a system of eight handshapes (representing groups of consonant sounds) in four positions around the face (representing groups of vowel sounds) in combination with natural mouth movements.

The simple but revolutionary concept swept across the country, especially among hearing parents of deaf children (over 95 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents). Since its invention 50 years ago, researchers have documented that Cued Speech holds the keys to language growth, phonemic awareness, increased communication and inclusion in the family, literacy, higher level thinking skills and a college education.

Dr. Trezek serves as a literacy intervention consultant for several schools for the deaf and public school programs throughout the United States and serves as an editorial board member for the American Annals of the Deaf, Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, and Remedial and Special Education. She was instrumental in decision by Illinois School for the Deaf to begin using Cued Speech.

“Within a sign bilingual setting, we found that students were making gains in their phonological skills as a result of receiving instruction from the Direct Instruction curricula supplemented by Visual Phonics. However, we were not seeing comparable increases in reading comprehension due to the demands of English syntax and grammar, said Dr. Trezek. “Since Visual Phonics provides sublexical (phoneme) and lexical (word) representations only, a spoken or signed form of English would need to be used to attend to the syntactical features of English. This prompted educators to explore Cued Speech since it was more closely aligned with a sign bilingual philosophy.”

Dr. Trezek is the lead author of the book Reading and Deafness: Theory, Research and Practice (Trezek, Wang, & Paul, 2010). Her second collaborative book, Early Literacy Development in Deaf Children (Mayer & Trezek, 2015), was recently published by Oxford University Press.

Top international researchers as well as visitors from around the United States, will attend the 50th Anniversary of Cued Speech Conference being held at the Westin Tysons Corner in Falls Church, VA. This major conference that celebrates the enormous progress in the education of students who are deaf/hard of hearing since Cued Speech was invented a half century ago. Cued Speech is a mode of communication that visually represents the sounds of language.

Native cuers, those who have grown up using the system, have broken the paradigm of deaf education with high literacy rates and astounding educational accomplishments. They are doctors, lawyers, professors, social workers and work in many professional fields. Today, deaf adult cuers are graduates from top American universities such as Brown, Wellesley, Harvard, Baylor, Yale, NY University and Berkeley, to name a few.

The NCSA is the national organization advocating for Cued Speech use and increasing literacy among deaf children. Cued Speech has had proven success in increasing the language and literacy of deaf and hard-of-hearing children.
The conference is of unprecedented content for the Cued Speech community and will provide a forum at which experts, educators, and families can come together and share their experiences and expertise for the first time in a decade. Ground breaking new applications of Cued Speech ae proving to be beneficial not only to the deaf and hard-of hearing, but also in helping children with special learning needs communicate effectively with their families and within society.

This conference provides an excellent opportunity for leaders in Cued Speech to explore the potential applications of Cued Speech for the future. Representatives attending the conference come from almost every state as well as the Philippines, Ethiopia, Iran, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and Poland.

The conference is expected to bring together 300 families and professionals from the cueing community at the Westin Tysons Corner in Falls Church, VA from July 8th to July 10th. The program includes thought provoking seminars on subjects such as cochlear implants, lifestyle issues for native cuers, bilingual education with ASL, early intervention, cued language transliteration and discussions of various applications for cueing. A Gala Awards Dinner will honor those who have made significant contributions to furthering Cued Speech.

The National Cued Speech Association was formed in 1982 and is the oldest cueing advocacy organization in the world. The NCSA champions effective communication, increased language, and literacy through the use of Cued Speech.

Sarina Roffe
National Cued Speech Association
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