This final report describes the activities and outcomes of OPTICA (Our Path Together Initiating Cultural Access) programs. For each program an information sheet indicates the goal, total participation, status of the goal, and activities of the program. Programs included: (1) Hands On: ASL Creative Story Telling, a program that used children's…

This article shares the experience of implementing, enhancing, and publicizing access to the American Sign Language (ASL) video collection distributed by California Department of Education. The author discusses the issues of service to deaf and hearing-impaired people, including policy adjustments, staff training, and development of the special…

Despite the fact that American Sign Language (ASL) has no written component, it still may be possible for deaf students to develop English literacy skills. To assess the effects of ASL on the development of English, it is proposed that native, and possibly non-native, signers be educated in a bilingual minority-language immersion program which…

A 4-year demonstration Total Communication Project was implemented at three schools (an elementary, a middle, and a high school) serving hearing impaired students. The goal of the project was for the six participating teachers to become consistent in their role modeling of English and American Sign Language (ASL), through weekly inservice on ASL…

This text on teaching language to students with hearing impairments stresses the use of multiple language learning pathways to meet the individual needs of students. The introductory chapter looks at language issues in the context of history, instruction, technology, culture, and the law. Chapter 2, on language acquisition, discusses the nature of…

This article explores some of the complexities of the question as to whether or not American Sign Language (ASL) is a foreign language. It reviews the historical oppression of the deaf, the development of ASL and its defining value to proponents of deaf culture, mentions other language systems (including foreign sign systems) used by the…

This report covers year 3 of a 5-year longitudinal study that is applying a bilingual language approach to development of American Sign Language (ASL) and English language and literacy skills in deaf learners. Specifically, the report describes how 45 teachers and mentors in five residential schools participated in inservice training on the use of…

Addresses how affective facial expression interacts with the linguistic forms in American Sign Language (ASL) motherese. The article presents data from both cross-sectional and longitudinal interaction from 15 deaf mothers signing with their deaf toddlers. Findings indicate a shift from affect to grammar at about the child's second birthday. (59…

A survey of 71 day and residential schools found 19 identified themselves as bilingual-bicultural (BiBi) programs. Of the 19 programs, 37% reported use of manually coded English. Fluency in American Sign Language of instructional and support staff varied, with 47% reporting no more than half of instructional staff were fluent. (Contains…

Describes a study that found, contrary to previous reports, that a strong, symmetrical release from proactive interference (PI) is the normal outcome for switches between American Sign Language (ASL) signs and English words and with switches between Manual and English alphabet characters. Subjects were college students enrolled in their first ASL…

As most deaf individuals experience two languages (American Sign Language, English) and three modalities (sign, speech, print), this article describes code variations and adaptations in particular situations at a school for the deaf. Most language was mixed in both code and mode; such mixing was seen to be a strategy which uniquely adapts…

Papers on phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics from a conference on formal linguistics include: "Major Class Alternations" (Young-Mee Yu Cho, S. Inkelas); "On Defining Complex Templates (R. Kager); "Sandhi and Syllables in Classical Sanskrit" (B. Kessler); "Catalexis in Word Stress: Evidence from Spanish and…

At Phoenix College, in Arizona, most classes have seen an increasing number of disabled students, but usually only one student with a given disability is present. When five deaf students enrolled in a Plants and Society course in fall 1994, the instructor became aware of problems which were not evident with single disabled students. First,…

This paper describes the planning and implementation of an instructional unit to teach the basics of American Sign Language to a class of nine elementary-aged male students with serious emotional disturbances (including one with a severe hearing impairment) in a laboratory school. The systematic instructional approach, direct instruction, was…

The move toward inclusive education potentially threatens the very heart of the Deaf cultural community, and may be an example of "epistemic violence" where the dominant ideology of equality of access to educational resources actually serves to reproduce structured inequalities. Deaf education has been moving away from a view of deafness as a…