Two hundred and fifty years ago, L'Epée and Heinicke were engaged in a disagreement over the role of signs in the education of deaf students, with L'Epée supporting both natural and methodical signs and Heinicke advocating for an oral method without a manual component. This was the beginning of the oral/manual controversy. This controversy set a…

Research suggests that English-language proficiency is critical if students who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) are to read as their hearing peers. One explanation for the traditionally reported reading achievement plateau when students are D/HH is the inability to hear insalient English morphology. Signing Exact English can provide visual…

A sample of elementary school-and high school-age deaf students in special education programs in the Australian state of Queensland using Australasian Signed English (ASE) took the Test of Syntactic Abilities (Quigley, Steinkamp, Power, & Jones, 1978) and wrote a story in response to a wordless picture sequence. Several analyses of the…

To describe the procedures that teachers in classrooms using manual communication employ in order to get and maintain student attention, four secondary teachers were videotaped on three occasions over a two-week period. The use of a mixture of deaf adult signing behavior and spoken discourse markers is reported. (Author)

Questionnaires completed by 195 teachers of deaf blind students revealed that additional handicapping conditions and the presence of undesirable behaviors had an important effect on the selection of communication methods. (CL)

A study compared intelligence scores of three groups of Israeli deaf children--23 with deaf parents/deaf siblings and manual communication (DpDs), 76 with hearing parents/deaf siblings, and 144 with hearing parents and siblings. The DpDs children were superior to other deaf children and comparable to hearing children on most intelligence measures.…

Review of four published cases of aphasia in deaf patients illustrates that loss and recovery of language functions in the deaf follow the pattern noted in hearing patients, and thus the notion of a separate cerebral area for manual speech postulated by Jackson (1878) is not supported. (Author/KW)

Criticism of Manually Coded English (MCE) with deaf children is examined in terms of its classification as a language, its inadequate rate of information flow, and its inexact use. Research on MCE is reviewed, and it is suggested that MCE systems are not being used to their best advantage. (CL)

Briefly examined is the nature of American Sign Language and its capabilities for use in abstract reasoning. (CB)

An examination of C. Ferguson's characteristics of diglossia (function, prestige, literary heritage, acquisition, standardization, stability, grammar, lexicon, and phonology) questions the assertion that American Sign Language is inferior to signed English. (CL)

The author proposes that a more complete manual system be used with the youngest child and that, when a child has demonstrated mastery in any modality, i.e., speech (sound and/or lip formation), sign, reading or writing, the system can be made leaner. (Author/SB)

This paper describes Seeing Essential English (SEE), which is a manual code of English designed to specifically reflect English, and signed in English word order. The paper attempts to clear up misconceptions concerning SEE and confusion between SEE and Signing Exact English, provide some historical background about its development, and review…

Described is the development of a summer touring theater group of deaf and hearing individuals. (GW)