^* Fictitious names have been used to protect these individuals.
was pre-lingually deaf, from three generations of deaf people. Today she is outgoing and successful in her job, and a ready communicator with everyone, deaf and hearing alike. Her communicating idioms, with both groups, are rich. She benefited from the twin forces in her childhood of family (all her family were highly attuned to the non-verbal idioms of communication) and one grandmother (who was hearning, and who provided what came to be seen as teh key intervening role at that time in Joan's development of a second language, the idiom of spoken English). Her own intellectual drive was the final component in a combination of motivating influences which led her to respond to both the financial and social necessities to gain verbal codes, leading to an ability to read and to understand what she read. She remains totally deaf and she knows that her speaking voice is not understood by strangers. Frank ^{* *} Fictitious names have been used to protect these individuals.
is a regular reader of newspapers, at least, that's what you would think if you saw him regularly. He does know certain words (or rather parts of words) and he constructs a story from his understanding of whatever catches his eye. At his job, which he does with skill, he is confident and earns the trust of colleagues and superiors. He is, however, illiterate. He knows that if he is seen to be ‘reading’ he will sustain the image he has created that he can read: he acts like a literate person. He is confident and competent in what he knows, which is enough for the regular and recurring nature of the tasks he is asked to perform in his job. He is knowledgeable and defensive about that knowledge but as a accepted at work, but any change or new demand, print-based, would sweep away his precarious confidence and, probably along with that, his job.