Second language acquisition (SLA) research offers valuable insight on how languages are learned and how they coexist and influence each other. Sign language learners offer unique perspectives on SLA, allowing researchers to test theories that are otherwise constrained by access to only one modality. Current literature on sign language learning…

The Language and Culture Division (LCD) provides accountability with support to districts that serve students participating in Bilingual Multicultural Education Programs (BMEPs) so that all participating students achieve the program goals as outlined by New Mexico statute and administrative code, which are: (1) students become bilingual and…

This paper discusses issues of language revitalization and linguistic prescriptivism related to the teaching of American Sign Language (ASL) in Canada. I describe the current and historical context for ASL teaching, including the increase in ASL course offerings at some postsecondary institutions, and discuss findings related to challenges in…

In 1981, Sweden was the first country in the world to entitle deaf pupils to a bimodal-bilingual education. However, drawing from interviews with key past Stockholm teacher trainers and on our own efforts to update teacher training, we note that sign-bilingual teacher training in Sweden has been ad hoc to this day. The interviewees' accounts…

The realisation of the linguistic rights of Deaf individuals is, to a considerable extent, dependent upon whether there are majority language speakers who acquire a sign language as an L2 and use their L2 skills. Still, the motivation of hearing persons in learning sign languages as L2s is a largely unmapped area. This study seeks to capture the…

A large body of literature has characterized unimodal monolingual and bilingual lexicons and how neighborhood density affects lexical access; however there have been relatively fewer studies that generalize these findings to bimodal (M2) second language (L2) learners of sign languages. The goal of the current study was to investigate parallel…

Enabling pedagogy and andragogy is discussed as a form of lifelong learning in which learners attain competences and skills as children (pedagogy) and as adults (andragogy) that enable them to engage in independent learning in the 21st century. Throughout the article the author avoids as much as possible the labels "deaf" and…

Deaf students are visual learners, and technology should be part of every bilingual classroom. However, deaf students need to learn to manipulate the hardware and software that allows them to express themselves and to advance their knowledge. Students need to understand what is meant when they are referred to "ASL text" or…

Given that the linguistic articulators for sign language are also used to produce co-speech gesture, we examined whether one year of academic instruction in American Sign Language (ASL) impacts the rate and nature of gestures produced when speaking English. A survey study revealed that 75% of ASL learners (N = 95), but only 14% of Romance language…

Provides a bilingual perspective about literacy development in deaf students and uses the bilingual perspective to recommend effective teaching strategies for this group of students with special needs. (Author/VWL)

Examined potential effects of early exposure to sign language on the use of communicative gestures by a bilingual hearing child of deaf parents. Data were analyzed to identify types and tokens of communicative gestures, words, signs, and the ways in which they were combined. (Author/VWL)

Literature on bilingual education suggests that the material used in teaching second language writing has an impact on the quality of the text. In addition, the material interacts differently with the level of bilingual proficiency of the students. This paper attempts to explore the written stories of three deaf students, which were produced under…

Papers presented at a 1977 symposium on language acquisition held at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee are included. Contents are as follows: "Assumptions, Methods and Goals in Language Acquisition Research" (Sheldon); "The Mother as LAD: Interaction between Order and Frequency of Parental Input and Child Production"…