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207 D A V I D A . S T E W A R T Instructional฀and฀Practical฀ Communication:฀ASL฀and฀EnglishBased ฀Signing฀in฀the฀Classroom W E CAN REACH THE FOLLOWING two conclusions after reviewing the use of sign communication in the classroom during the past 40 years of deaf education: • American Sign Language (ASL) and English-based signing are here to stay. • There is more to good teaching than just the way a teacher communicates. As obvious as it might appear, it took decades of classroom teaching and years of heated debate at conferences and in publications to arrive at a point in time where the field is ready to embrace the implications of these statements. To do so, however, the field’s philosophical stance must endorse English and ASL as classroom languages and must present a framework within which both languages can be used to meet instructional and communication objectives. The consequence of this stance is that teachers will possess the skills to use both languages and the understanding of pedagogy to make sound judgments about when to use ASL and when to use English in its print, speech, and sign modalities. Such a philosophy is the basis of the instructional and practical communication (IPC) approach to teaching deaf children. Instructional฀and฀Practical฀Communication The most fertile of all learning platforms in the classroom is the interplay of thoughts that occurs when teacher and student draw from their individual portfolios of language and communication skills to negotiate an understanding of one another. This platform is the premise for the IPC philosophy, which is applicable to all school-age deaf children and across all subject matter. IPC allows teachers to make decisions about how they will use ASL and English in their instruction and interactions with deaf students. For good teaching to take place using the IPC approach, language development 208฀ David฀A.฀Stewart must occur in tandem with the growth of subject matter knowledge and skills. To make effective decisions about using ASL and English, teachers must rely on the instructional requirements of the curriculum and the communication needs of their students, which implies that teachers must first have a strong command of both languages in all of their expressive and receptive modalities. For good communication to occur in the IPC approach, students are taught so they will develop the linguistic tools necessary to comprehend communication in both languages. Instructional฀Considerations Learning and language development go hand in hand because deaf students experience language delays in their acquisition of vocabulary and grammar with respect to the reading and language requirements of the curriculum for their grade level. To teach the curriculum in a manner that is suitable to deaf students’ learning and communication needs, teachers need to plan lessons that address two main questions: • What educational activities are important to achieving curricular goals? • What language experiences will help deaf students best learn from these activities ? In essence, the language experiences associated with instruction are integral to the success of the instruction. For deaf students, the goal is to acquire language skills while they are learning subject matter. Stewart and Kluwin’s (2001) approach to lesson planning makes language experiences an integral part of educational experiences. They suggest that teachers incorporate into their planning the following three principles: 1. Lessons should be grounded in authentic experiences. The authors note that a “series of disconnected sentences in a language book is only as relevant as a child’s linguistic and experiential background will make it. In the absence of much real-life experiences, deaf children become restricted in their ability to acquire new vocabulary and formulate new sentences” (p. 9). Experiences also challenge existing understandings and beget new ones—the heart of learning. 2. Vocabulary development should be integrated into lessons. In this respect, words need to appear in contexts that define their meanings. It is not sufficient, for example, to simply list definitions of words that are critical to a social studies or science lesson. Words are best learned when students experience them in a meaningful manner, including classroom discourse and incidental conversations inside and outside of the classroom. With respect to signing, it is incumbent upon teachers to model the use of new words in sentences either in ASL or English or both, using signs and fingerspelling as necessary. 3. Lesson planning should include opportunities for self-expression. Lessons can be designed to include students in conversations with the teacher and one another . An...

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