D/deaf children of Deaf parents reportedly begin learning finger-spelling as young as thirteen months old, but deaf children born to hearing, nonsigning parents lack natural access to the native (spoken) language of their families, often exhibiting later language development. Forty-four deaf adults participated in a fingerspelling test of…

On October 13, 2006, the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department arrested 133 Gallaudet University students, staff, and alumni, the largest number of university arrests in the United States since the 1960s. The arrests occurred amid weeks of building and campus lockdowns, hunger strikes, a sprawling tent city, rallies, and a two…

This article addresses whether there are enough ASL teacher preparation programs in the country and how prepared are their graduates. It examines six organizations that provide teaching standards: the Education Section of the National Association of the Deaf, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the American Sign Language…

Describes procedure for inventing signs in American Sign Language to aid in teaching scientific subjects. Pretests, posttests, and retention tests were used to examine whether the use of new signs for technical terms aids in learning and recalling scientific concepts. Preliminary results favor technical signs over fingerspelling. (Author/LMO)

Discusses the responses of over 100 US colleges and universities to a survey regarding their policy on accepting American Sign Language (ASL) as meeting the foreign language requirement. While some accept ASL, most do not because they do not consider it a foreign language, nor deafness a culture. (SED)

Although American Sign Language (ASL) has a long and rich history in America and scholarly research on ASL is in its third decade, ASL has been slow to garner any degree of status in the academic community, although some higher education institutions are beginning to consider ASL for their foreign-language curriculum. (CB)

Describes the long process through which American Sign Language (ASL) was accepted in fulfillment of the foreign-language requirement at the University of New Mexico. It was discovered the mutual discovery and sharing of facts about ASL in the long deliberations proved effective. (CB)

Examination and comparison of the changes in movement trajectories of two initially naive American Sign Language (ASL) students during an introductory ASL course found that their movement pattern increased in speed, symmetry, and replicability and grew more constrained in amplitude as the semester progressed. (Author/CB)

Suggests methods for incorporating American Sign Language and knowledge about the deaf culture into a bilingual/bicultural approach to deaf education. (CB)

American higher education must extend its notion of pluralistic recognition and inquiry to the language and culture of the deaf community and appreciate the individual gifts that this cultural group brings to the whole society. (CB)

Although American Sign Language (ASL) currently lacks an accepted writing system, one of the common reasons why it is not accepted for credit in foreign language programs, ASL does have a rich literary tradition. Several curricular remedies to improve those sign language courses are proposed. (CB)

An anthropological study of the American Deaf Culture points out that its members do not merely constitute a subculture and that study of American Sign Language, like many other foreign languages, offers knowledge of not only a natural language but also the culture in which it is used. (CB)

Academic acceptance of American Sign Language (ASL) and its speakers can be achieved if higher education institutions make affirmative action training and employment commitments to deaf individuals. (CB)

Outlines the procedures used to identify, analyze, and organize components of an American Sign Language curriculum, based on processes used to develop second-language curricula. Students are encouraged to develop communicative competence and cultural awareness in a classroom environment, allowing for natural language learning. (CB)

Examines the educational purposes of foreign-language requirements and asserts that the study of American Sign Language meets these goals in ways in which other "languages" (English dialects, computer languages) do not. (CB)