Language barriers negatively affect access to social services, particularly for D/deaf populations who use Sign Language. "D/deaf" is used to encompass both the cultural conception of capital-D Deafness and the medical conception of lowercase-d deafness. Language translation/interpretation is a common need among practitioners of social,…

To date, there has not been any research conducted on the South Sudanese Deaf community and South Sudanese Sign Language (SSSL). This article presents an introductory note about both with information gained from personal observations of the authors and from online resources. It provides an insight for furthering extensive research on the newest…

For generations, classroom English teachers have exploited knowledge of English phonemes to teach hearing children. In this article, the author explains how to exploit the strategy of using American Sign Language (ASL) graphemes to teach deaf and hard of hearing children. The goal is a fully evolved bilingual environment in which the children…

Societal views of Deaf people typically stem from a medical or deficit perspective, which then informs educational practices. In contrast, educational settings that embrace a cultural perspective provide visual language and strategies that can benefit all students. This article will address three common myths about American Sign Language (ASL) and…

This article describes how teaching deaf students to read has been challenging and contentious, yet, one crucial attribute to developing reading skills is early exposure to American Sign Language (ASL). ASL seemed to serve as a bridge to achieving English literacy and academic success partly because early use of ASL enables deaf students to…

The emphasis on potentiality needs to be understood in relation to the evolution of deaf education and the place of sign language in deaf education. We can look upon this evolution from a rational perspective. However, this can only be understood and adequately addressed while also taking into account the emotional chord that is struck in deaf…

While current debates oppose the cochlear implant's privileging of speech acquisition to teaching sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language for organizing thought itself. Should the order of gestural signs…

Communication is an innate behavior people engage in to convey one's thoughts, needs, and interests to others (Knapp, Hall, & Horgan, 2014). Recommended Practices from the Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children (DEC, 2014) encourage teachers to partner with families to implement strategies that support…

The high degree of comprehensibility between the signed languages in Trieste (present-day Italy) and Austria is very probably due to their joint history of deaf schools within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Investigation undertaken in archives in Trieste and Klagenfurt has revealed interesting similarities in the education of deaf children there…

The focus of this article is the experiences of Deaf Philadelphians vis-à-vis language policy and practice at PSD. We delineate the official and unofficial communication philosophies and pedagogies from the school's inception to present day, providing a framework for understanding the trajectory of linguistic freedom and restriction of its…

Recently, the authors' district reconfigured the program for deaf and hard of hearing students, combining the Total Communication (TC) and Listening and Spoken Language (LSL) programs for elementary students and relocating students and staff into a single school. This prompted staff to reflect on and discuss the pedagogy unique to each program.…

Helping young deaf and hard of hearing children explore ASL and English is one of the important jobs with which the preschool teachers who work with those children are tasked. Learning ASL and English, the children will become bilingual, fluent in the two languages they will use throughout their lives. Working with two languages requires planning.…

This article discusses the occurrence of voids in the intersection between Hebrew and Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Using Weizman's classification of voids (2010, 2016) in our analysis, we have discovered that languages that employ visual and auditory modalities make use of an additional category of voids: modality-induced voids. Our corpus…

Cued Speech is a visual mode of communication in which mouth movements of speech combine with "cues" to make the sounds (phonemes) of traditional spoken languages look different. Cueing allows users who are deaf, hard of hearing, or who have language/communication disorders, to access the basic, fundamental properties of spoken languages…

Research shows that teaching sign language to all young children has a wide range of benefits, from enhancing social-emotional and preliteracy skills to supporting positive parent-child relationships. With "Sing & Sign for Young Children," early childhood professionals will have a fun, easy, and highly effective way to teach and…