Research on translanguaging practices of Deaf people have shown their creative multimodal resources to communicate (Kusters 2017; Holmström and Schönström 2017; Moriarty Harrelson 2017). These findings have enlightened disciplines like sociolinguistics and bilingual education and can be equally important for policy makers who make decisions that…

The earliest descriptions of Latin finger alphabets were recorded in southern Europe between 1579 and 1589. New literary and visual evidence for sixteenth-century Ottoman Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sign systems are presented and analyzed in this article.

High illiteracy rates among the Argentine deaf population, even after long years of schooling, point to the need to revise certain approaches to deaf literacy, particularly in school settings. Qualitative change in deaf literacy requires the use of multiple conceptual tools if learners are to be able to tackle its complexity without reductionism…

Grammars of signed languages tend to be based on grammars established for written languages, particularly the written language in use in the surrounding hearing community of a sign language. Such grammars presuppose categories of discrete elements which are combined into various sorts of structures. Recent analyses of signed languages go beyond…

In this article, the author discusses why it is difficult to transliterate American Sign Language (ASL) and the visual realities of a deaf individual's life into creative texts written in English. Even on the sentence level, she says, written English resists the unsettling presence of transliteration across modalities. A sign cannot be "said." If…

Success in teaching deaf pupils to read has not increased in decades, but new conceptualizations of literacy, clear understanding that deafness is a human condition and not a deficit, and recent research on how deaf families accomplish what schools do not all point to better ways of teaching deaf children to read. (46 references) (Author/CB)

Basing a manual communication system on written forms of English has two problems: (1) conventional forms of manual communication are based on the wrong modality; and (2) they do not represent English on any level. This causes an imbalance in the word-to-sign ratio in the classroom. (PJM)

Discusses the issue of the use of signed language dictionaries in the standardization of signed languages with reference to the Australian Sign language (Auslan) dictionaries. Details the structure of the Auslan dictionaries and argues that bilingual, bidirectional dictionaries of this type must be produced if communities are to encourage language…

This investigation explored recognition memory for sign language vocabulary in sign language students. Ten beginning and 10 advanced students were asked to judge their familiarity with 50 old and new vocabulary items presented in both written (sign gloss) and signed stimulus modes. (JL)

Examination of a profoundly deaf child's fingerspelling in more than 100 hours of interaction videotaped at intervals over six years revealed a gradual acquisition of the rules for fingerspelling and knowledge of the relation of fingerspelling to signs and to printed and spoken words. (Author/CB)

Examines the relation of Pidgin Sign English to American Sign Language and the written English of deaf persons. (AM)

Briefly describes a program that sought to improve the written English skills of deaf adolescents' whose first language was American Sign Language, focusing on first-language skills, metalinguistic skills, translating skills, lexical matching across languages, translation of syntactical structures, and recognition of the importance of the…

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)

Deaf and hearing children at two grade levels (fourth and eighth) provided written texts for an analysis of text structure and quality. Deaf writers used as many cohesive devices as hearing writers but used fewer different lexical terms per device. The deaf children's texts are discussed in terms of possible language transference. (66 references)…

Reports on the continuing work in the development of a computerized writing system for American Sign Language (ASL) called Signfont. Inventories for handshapes and nonmanual markers are presented and discussed extensively. A proposed inventory of phonetic handshapes in ASL are appended. (Author/LMO)