"Can You Hear Me? ... Good!"

We've all heard those Verizon commercials where the man asks "can you hear me? ..Good!" Well, in the aspects of phonemic awareness, my deaf students can't hear me, and its not good! So then what?
Phonics is such an important part of reading. If we cannot "hear" the word in our heads, we will probably have a difficult time understanding it. In the same way, deaf children struggle with phonics because they cannot hear the words. Many deaf children are math and science lovers because the English language is too abstract for them. When they deal with numbers, it makes sense. When they deal with words they have never seen before, they are at a total loss. There are a couple of programs that have been developed for deaf children including cued speech and visual phonics. These methods visually and manually express phonemes so that deaf kids can actually "see the sound" of the phoneme. I think both of these methods are great ideas, and know they have been used with some success. The one thing I know is that I am very glad I am not going to be working with elementary students because then I won't have to teach them how to read! I know that even at the high school level my deaf kids will struggle with reading.

Cued Speech 

 Visual Phonics
http://seethesound.org/materials.html

Can you think of any ways that you would work with deaf and/or hard of hearing high school kids to *continue* to promote good reading skills and phonemic awareness?