Meeting Monday, October 22nd, 2007

On October 22nd, 2007 our guest speaker will be Marianne Flanagan. Marianne, a Speech/Language Pathologist, will be talking about and demonstrating Cued English. She began her work with the deaf and hard of hearing at the Calgary Board of Education. She has been in private practice since 1969. Marianne was the Chairperson of the Board of Directors when the Alberta Deaf Centre was built and has been involved with both CHHA-Calgary and Deaf & Hard of Hearing Services for over 35 years.

Marianne made presentations to the participants of the first training program for Speechreading Instructors held in Calgary in 1994-95. She talks about Cued English in the Sound Ideas video that was produced in Calgary by CHHA to help people who need to learn about hearing loss and learn to speechread when they are unable to attend classes.

When Marianne left the school board in 1990, she began to study Cued English and train people with hearing loss how to enhance their communication using Cued English. She was on the National Cued Speech Association Board for 18 years, and is now concentrating her energy on promoting Cued English in Alberta and Western Canada.

What is Cued English?

It is a mode of communication that uses the mouth and hand shapes to visually distinguish the building blocks or phonemes of a spoken language, thus allowing for the clear transmission of language between two or more cuers. Hand shapes, hand placements, and hand movements combine with mouth movements to clearly show the stream of consonants and vowels that represent the words and thoughts of a cuer.

The Original Purpose of the System

Dr. R. Orin Cornett, the creator of Cued Speech (now referred to as Cued English), developed the system in 1966 for the purpose of improving the poor literacy levels he saw occurring in deaf education around the country. He developed the communication system to enable parents of children who are deaf or hard of hearing to easily make their spoken language clearly visible, so that their children could internalize the appropriate phonemic language base for literacy through exposure.

By providing access to this stream of consonants and vowels with additional information (facial expression, force of cues, head movement, etc.), Cued English conveys a rich language visually with all of its intricacies and nuances including laughter, surprise, anger, sarcasm, teasing, annoyance, indifference, joy, and so forth.

Speech-language therapists, special educators, reading teachers, linguistics professors and others have expanded the uses of Cued English to benefit individuals with a variety of language, speech, communication and learning needs.

Cued English is used with children with and without hearing loss, for a variety of purposes, such as accelerating the learning of phonics or speech or language instruction. The children may be typical children or have autism, apraxia, cerebral palsy, deaf-blindness, developmental disabilities or other learning needs. It is especially helpful to children who have one or more additional disabilities with their hearing loss. Profoundly deaf children can learn the sounds of English from cueing them because this information, though it is totally visual, is processed in the auditory part of the brain

You can learn the basics of Cued English in a weekend workshop.

People who have learned to cue say that it is like sounding out words with your hands.

For people with hearing loss, lipreading/speechreading skills combined with Cued English means that you never have to guess at what someone is saying. You can know for sure!!

Friends and family can learn to cue, and add these 'cues' as they talk so you can all continue to communicate accurately together in exactly the same languages you have always used. (Cues are used in over 55 different languages and dialects.)

To find out more about Cued English you can visit www.cuedspeech.org. This site will give you links to lots of other sites. And of course, if you Google Cued Speech or Cued English you will find all sorts of information.

Marianne S. Flanagan, B.Ed., M.A., RSLP. S-LP(C)
Speech/Language Pathologist
NCSA Certified CS Instructor
8307 Hawkview Manor Rd. N.W.
Calgary, AB T3G 2Z6
403-239-6988, Fax 403-374-2227
Cued English: Language, Literacy and Excellence

For more information about CHHA-Calgary Meetings and the location, please visit About CHHA.

To read about previous guest speakers, please choose one of the links below:

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CHHA-Calgary promotes self-help, advocacy, information and visibility for Calgarians with hearing loss.

Visitors are always welcome.

Meeting Monday, October 22nd, 2007

What is Cued English?

The Original Purpose of the System