Educating Deaf Students: Global Perspectives

Is It Time to Look Beyond Teachers ’Signing Behavior?

Is It Time to Look Beyond Teachers’ Signing Behavior? C. TANE AKAMATSU, DAVID STEWART, AND CONNIE MAYER
Since the 1970s, classrooms and programs for deaf students have evolved from exclusive reliance on oral/auditory methods to using combined methods of speech and English-based signing and bilingual methods that include the use of a natural sign language, such as American Sign Language (ASL). In spite of all of these changes, we have not seen much change in the academic abilities, and in particular, the literacy abilities of deaf children (Moores, 2001; Paul, 1998). In view of these results, it is surprising to see that research has done little to guide classroom practices (Moores, 2001; Stewart & Kluwin, 2001). One strand of research has looked at the use of signs in the classroom and teachers’ attempts to provide a signed representation of English. Good communication, while desirable, does not necessarily equate with good teaching (Lytle & Rovins, 1997; Stewart, 1993). Instructional method and style of teaching are critical components of effective teaching. Hence, for an optimal learning environment for the education of deaf children to occur, there must be a marriage of good communication skills and sound teaching practices. In this chapter, we examine the literature on teachers’ use of signing in the classroom for clues about future directions in research that aim to help improve the academic performance of deaf students. We suggest that by concentrating solely on the question of whether a natural sign language or some form of English-based signing should dominate in the classroom, we have lost the forest for the trees. The complex communication needs of deaf students demand flexibility in practice and a solid theoretical underpinning for that practice. Examination of the use of classroom signing from a historical perspective is aided by the fact that the revival of sign language use in the classroom has been documented in the literature. Moreover, there are now deaf chil40 dren who have grown up in a signing environment with hearing parents—a situation that would have been a rarity two generations ago when oralism dominated the field. These facts alone would lead us to conclude that many deaf children have multiple sources of successful linguistic interaction: at home with parents and siblings and at school with teachers and classmates. Since the first attempts at reintroducing signing into school programs in the 1970s, the kinds of signing that have been used and the conceptualizations for classroom instruction have themselves undergone several changes. Historical Review of Classroom Signing: Forms and Functions When signing emerged as the dominant form of communication in the education of deaf children (it has always been the dominant form of communication in the Deaf community), the use of simultaneous communication (in this case English-based signing with voice) was anchored on the belief that speech combined with a signed form of English would provide a model of the English language and hence, a means for deaf children to acquire English through face-to-face interactions with English signers. Quite simply , Simultaneous Communication (SC) refers to the practice of using the spoken and signed modalities simultaneously. The nature of the signed component of SC is, however, a point of contention. Because no modern formal signed forms of English were available 30 years ago, some educators believed that they had to be created. These created English sign systems, which collectively came to be known as Manually Coded English (MCE), represented attempts to encode English at the phonological, morphological, and/or syntactic level. (The specific mechanics of encoding varied among the systems.) This was accomplished by combining signs from a natural sign language, initialized signs, invented morphemes, and fingerspelling to represent English. These systematic attempts at representing English on the hands began to appear in the 1970s, although some manner of doing this was used when Clerc and Gallaudet began teaching in their school for deaf students 180 years ago (Moores, 2001; Stokoe, 1960). All of these invented systems (e.g., Seeing Essential English [SEE 1], Signing Exact English [SEE 2], etc.) presupposed that “the correct form of bimodality is the exact manual representation of all English morphemes presented simultaneously in sign Teachers’ Signing Behavior 41 and in speech” (Maxwell, 1990, p. 339). It is arguable whether “English in a manual form” is an accurate description of the forms of communication that occur in classrooms because there is considerable variation in how much of the English language...