Traditionally, if parents wanted their child to develop speech skills, they were told not to use sign language with their child. After several years of speech training, if a child did not succeed, then sign language could be taught as a back-up method. The effects of this misconception can be devastating to the child's welfare. By placing a child in a bilingual environment that is truly sensitive to spoken language issues, one where the two languages are used in similar contexts but kept separate, parents and teachers have more information to determine what the child is capable of achieving.
Language development is one of the priorities of any early education program.
Since access to spoken language is limited for a child who is deaf or hard of hearing, one way to provide full access to language is to use a visual language. Within the school day, as well as in their home environment, the children can also be exposed to spoken English in safe, predictable contexts. In this way they can be exposed to both languages separately during the course of everyday interactions. It then becomes possible to more clearly observe progress in each language, both expressive and receptive. A number of artificially-developed sign systems based on English began to emerge in the 1960s, along with the hope that this would be the solution to many problems in deaf education.