In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

EN G L I S H A N D ASL: CL A S S R O O M AC T I V I T I E S T O SH E D SO M E LI G H T O N T H E US E O F TW O LA N G U A G E S 139 SHANNON ALLEN 10 I came to the field of Deaf education twelve years ago with a background in linguistics and a love for children. Although I immediately became aware of the controversy around language and communication choices for deaf children, it has always been evident to me that American Sign Language (ASL), as a natural visual language, is the ideal choice for a deaf child’s daily communication and education . It is also evident that English, as the dominant language of commerce and power in the United States and around the world, is a necessary choice. Both languages are equally capable of expressing all that a person might think, imagine, feel, wonder, know, or dream. I am passionate in my search for ways to allow the deaf students I teach to express themselves in ASL and English and to understand other people who express themselves in either language. It is not my purpose in this chapter to convince anyone else that this is what they should do. Rather, I offer practical methods for how to go about doing it and explain the basis for my attention to language forms in these particular activities. In this chapter I describe three activities that I have used in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms with children who are deaf. This is the kind of essay that I am always looking to read as a teacher eager for more ideas that (a) uphold what I believe to be important for learning and teaching and (b) are practical to implement in my own classroom. As you will see, the activities I present here originated in the work of others, and in the spirit of reciprocation, I hope that readers will learn from what I have added or changed and make their own adaptations as well. This is also, I hope, an essay that researchers will read to see practical applications of theories and directions for further research, that administrators will read to find out how they can help teachers enact lessons that support bilingual ASL and English language development, and that parents will read to see what’s possible for their deaf child. 140 Shannon Allen LA N G U A G E U S E Depending on the language models they have at home and at school, deaf students may see sign language varieties that range from constructed manual codes for English, to pidgin Signed English, to native or near native ASL (Gee and Goodhart 1988, 54). English is used in spoken forms either along with signing, or by itself. It is also the language of print. For example, during a classroom discussion about a science experiment, students and teachers are using ASL. The teacher records the students’ predictions about the outcome of the experiment on chart paper—in English. The process of translating from the students’ signs to the teacher’s writing is usually invisible. Because of this distribution, where codeswitching between the languages happens simultaneously with a change in modality, students have little basis for recognizing that there are, in fact, two distinct languages. Furthermore, for the most part, English remains the only language that is taught in school and tested in school, and it is the language that is problematized when it comes to deaf students’ academic achievement. (Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan 1996, 333). Even in schools where ASL is recognized as a language of instruction, it may not be formally taught. There is no published ASL curriculum for deaf children (although there are several for teaching it as a second language to hearing students). Students can learn the rules of English when explicitly taught, but what they have internalized (to varying degrees) are rules of ASL (Bochner and Albertini 1988). Without conscious attention paid to ASL in the classroom, interference from ASL influences how English is learned (and not learned). Given these conditions, one approach to teaching deaf children both languages more effectively is to teach the differences between the two languages explicitly, with the identification of each language and instruction in translating between them—a consciously bilingual approach—a part of everyday experience. Three activities that I use to accomplish these...

Share