In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was famously advocating for sign language to be the language of instruction for deaf children in the United States, European philosophers were founding modern linguistics. Gallaudet was not able to benefit from their breakthroughs, however, because his upbringing,…

For the past 12 years I have been involved teaching music at a deaf school in Melbourne, philanthropically supported by Musica Viva's Equal Music program. The students use Auslan as their primary language and prior to the residency there had not been a music program in the school for more than a decade. Students now participate fully in the…

In this concluding article of an "American Annals of the Deaf" Special Issue, we draw on Vygotsky's "Fundamentals of Defectology" to argue that the essence of deaf pedagogy is not centered on constructing deaf students' hearing abilities but on a biosocial orientation that considers the whole multimodal child with unfettered…

Signing systems that attempted to represent spoken language via manual signs -- some invented, and some borrowed from natural sign languages -- have historically been used in classrooms with deaf children. However, despite decades of research and use of these systems in the classroom, there is little evidence supporting their educational…

In this article we discuss the practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers. Applying the translanguaging concept to deaf signers brings a different perspective by focusing on sensorial accessibility. While the sensory orientations of deaf people are at the heart of their translanguaging practices, sensory asymmetries…

Responding to an article by Grushkin (EJ1174123) on how deaf children best learn to read, published, along with the present article, in an "American Annals of the Deaf" special issue, the authors review American Sign Language gloss. Topics include how ASL gloss enables deaf children to learn to read in their own language and…

The question "What's it like to be deaf?" has engendered debates on whether deafness should be considered a "loss," a "gain," or both. It is doubtful that many scholars would agree that an adequate answer entails only a depiction of the degree of hearing acuity or loss, perhaps in conjunction with age at onset,…

In U.S. deaf education, disablement results from a normative interpretation of disability in the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. However, Vygotsky's "Fundamentals of Defectology" (1993) allows educators to view current deaf education pedagogical practices through a sociocultural-constructivist lens and reject the current…

Teaching young children with language delays to say or sign the word "more" has had strong support from the literature since the 1970s (Bloom & Lahey, 1978; Holland, 1975; Lahey & Bloom, 1977; Lederer, 2002). Semantically, teaching children the word/sign "more" is supported by research on early vocabulary development…

This article has been excerpted from "Perspectives on the Sign Language Factor in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges of Sustainability" (Lutalo-Kiingi and De Clerck) in "Sign Language, Sustainable Development, and Equal Opportunities: Envisioning the Future for Deaf Students" (G. A. M. De Clerck and P. V. Paul (Eds.) 2016). In this…

This paper critiques the role of translanguaging in deaf education by examining how, and under what conditions, translanguaging practices can enhance learning and teaching. The paper explores the premise that translanguaging represents an additive view of bilingualism and multilingualism for deaf learners and offers an innovative departure from,…

In this article in this "American Annals of the Deaf" special issue that also includes the present article, Grushkin (EJ1174123) argues that the writing difficulties of many deaf and hard of hearing children result primarily from the orthographic nature of the writing system; he proposes a new system based on features found in signed…

In recent years, robots have increasingly been implemented as tutors in both first- and second-language education. The field of robot-assisted language learning (RALL) is developing rapidly. Studies have been published targeting different languages, age groups, and aspects of language and using different robots and methodologies. The present…

The language of instruction for Deaf children in the American educational system has long been the subject of debate: Should Deaf children learn language via American Sign Language (ASL), English-based visual communication systems, or spoken English only? It has long been the practice of the standard epistemology to encourage the use of verbal…

Students who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH) need additional support to learn curricular content and achieve academic outcomes. Students who attend rural schools may face greater challenges since they may have more limited access to services provided specially trained deaf educators. Yet, they need specialized instruction in learning how to use…