Describes how using American Sign Language can facilitate the development of skills in spoken English for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Discusses factors influencing how well a child with deafness will develop spoken language and the need to teach the two languages separately. (CR)

Describes planning, implementation, and evaluation of an instructional unit that uses a direct instruction approach to teach the basics of American Sign Language to elementary-age students with serious emotional or behavior disorders. Figures list lesson topics and instructional objectives, provide a sample lesson plan and a story suitable for…

Sign language production of 14 low-functioning students (ages 9 to 20) with autistic disorder were examined. The location aspect of signs was produced more accurately by subjects than either the handshape or movement aspects. Wide individual differences were observed. Sign vocabulary size and accuracy was correlated with performance on two…

The Sharing Shakespeare project at New York City's Public School for the Deaf developed a unique, elective, process-oriented literature class that combined teenage profoundly deaf students and culturally diverse, limited-English-proficient hearing students. Aided by multimedia technologies, these students collaborated in learning, reading, and…

Examines the concept of linguistic legitimacy (and illegitimacy) using three specific cases--Black English, American Sign Language, and Esperanto. The paper argues that legitimacy is grounded more on personal, political, and ideological biases than on linguistic criteria. (SM)

A within-subject multiple baseline design was used to teach a young girl with severe disabilities six target signs that were functionally equivalent to existing behaviors (e.g., leading, reaching). Teaching occurred only in the presence of behavioral indication by the subject. Results showed successful acquisition and discriminating use of the six…

Assessment of the prelinguistic behaviors of 43 deaf children (ages 8 to 49 months) of hearing parents in Israel found only partial resemblance to the theoretical model of prelinguistic communication in hearing infants. Unique interrelationships among pointing and early noncommunicative behaviors were found with no correlation between use of…

Describes a preschool class for deaf children co-taught by two teachers (one hearing, one deaf) that uses a whole language approach to build students' American Sign Language (ASL) and written English skills. The class uses a thematic approach to organize learning activities through the creative use of ASL. (DB)

Compared gestures of Chinese and American deaf children who had not been exposed to a usable conventional language model with speech of hearing children learning Mandarin or English. Found that deaf children conveyed central elements of motion events in their communications. Deaf American and Chinese children used gestures to express motion in…

This study analyzed storybook reading sessions involving a mother and her three-year-old twin daughters, one of whom was deaf. The mother asked the hearing twin almost twice as many questions as she asked of the deaf twin, and asked the hearing twin primarily conventional test questions, but she asked the deaf twin more gestural questions.…

Panelists involved in deaf education teaching, research, and administration discuss the application of English-as-a-Second-Language methods for teaching English to deaf students, focusing on educational theories, use of American Sign Language, teacher education needs, and sociocultural factors. (CB)

Observation of severely to profoundly deaf four- to nine-year-olds (N=24) producing three types of multi-morphemic classifier predicates in American Sign Language showed that handshape production was influenced both by morphological and syntactic complexity, while handshape errors were not based on anatomical complexity alone. (26 references)…

A bilingual instructional program was developed to teach written English to elementary-aged deaf students who are fluent in American Sign Language. The student-directed language learning uses interactive video and offers five activity options: watch a story, read a story, answer questions about a story, write a story, or caption a story.…