The use of visualization to read aloud poetry

One of the most challenging, yet rewarding, reading activities is visualizing poetic meanings that involve negotiating meanings between two languages. Gayle is an English poet and she recruited me an ASL poet because she knew I enjoyed ASL poetry as a hobby. She spearheaded her project for Oregon School for the Deaf (OSD) as the first school for the Deaf to participate in national-wide Poetry Out Loud contest.

Participating students worked with Galye to analyze the shades of meaning with their selected poems and they worked with me to visualize these poetic meanings in ASL. It was not a simple task for each student. First, a student must visualize and interpret meanings in English. Then, she/he must interpret these meanings in ASL. Gayle and I faced the tremendous challenge of helping students to visualize and interpret in both languages and these students often worked back forth between us at least four times before each student finally could retain the original poet's voice with the final ASL expression.

Usually, Gayle relied on my intuitive hunches to evaluate their uses of ASL to visualize the English meanings. Poems expressed in ASL may look nice in appearance for others, but I often coached these students to explore a range of nuanced meanings through subtle movements and facial expressions so they can create the appropriate moods for the speakers of the poems. When they experience the moods through signing, I ask them to re-read their poems again. At this point they discover the speakers’ voices coming alive through their own words. The speakers’ moods finally flow through their ASL expressions. Then, they were ready to express poetry out loud on the stage.

Tiffany Hill was one such student who worked constantly until she fully understood the poem she chose for the poetry contest. Her visualization in ASL perfectly matched the mood and the implied meanings of the poem in the English form. Gayle and I decided that she was ready but we didn’t expect her to win state championship for Oregon Poetry Out Loud. She was the first Deaf contestant to participate in national Poetry Out Loud contest and she has become an inspiration for other Deaf students.

Gayle and I were thrilled to see the positive experience for her and our school. Based on this experience, visualization turns out to be a natural, inherent reading process for any Deaf student, as long as there is a dedicated support to facilitate it.