A Manual of Religious Signs (review)

Reviews A Manual of Religious Signs, Carter E. Bearden and Jerry F. Potter, Co-editors, 191 pp., paper, $3.95, Home Mission Board, Southern Baptist Convention, 1350 Spring St., NW, Atlanta, Georgia 30309, 1973. This book is the result of several years of effort on the part of a number of church workers from various denominations to fashion new signs for religious terms normally used during church services. A total of 240 signs, all sketched by the Rev. Jerry Potter, are to be found in what is hoped to be the first volume of a series of similar books. Each sign is well illustrated , depicting the position and movement of the hands and accompanied by a definition of the religious term along with a brief description of how the sign is to be shaped. Thus, church interpreters now have at hand, signs for words which formerly had to be laboriously spelled out. The introduction to the book consists of illustrations and descriptions of six suffixes used with some of the religious terms and signs. An index is located at the back of the book. Others, besides church interpreters, will benefit from using this book whenever manual communication is employed. Francis C. Higgins Department of Chemistry Gallaudet College Washington, DC 20002 Aural Rehabilitation, Daniel Ling, Ph.D., and Agnes H. Ling, Ph.D., 324 pp., Alexander Graham Bell Association , 3417 Volta Place, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007, 1978. The text was written for parents, teacher/ clinicians, and administrators in an attempt to describe how knowledge and skills related to verbal learning could be employed in the aural habilitation of hearing-impaired children. Major chapters are devoted to communication, development of spoken language, use of residual hearing, speech assessment, language development, and reading. Significant portions are similar to material previously contained in a work on speech and the hearing-impaired child by the senior author. The title of the present text is misleading in that most of the material does not deal with aural habilitation. The material is poorly organized and incomplete , and there is no comprehensive treatment of either theoretical or practical issues related to aural habilitation. A parent would expect specific suggestions from this book. A clinician/ teacher would look for recommendations for dealing with children in tutorial, integrated, and self-contained settings. An administrator would be interested in the hearing-impaired child's special needs for aural habilitation under differing circumstances. Unfortunately, all would be disappointed by the text under review . It contains little material of practical use for them. Donald F. Moores, Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pa. 16802 The Things I Like To Do, I Am A Kitten, All By Myself, With My Legs, Gallaudet Preschool Signed English Project, Harry Bornstein, Director, 16 pp., illustrated , $1.75, Gallaudet College Press, Washington, D.C, 1975. These four books are valuable to parents of deaf children, to deaf parents with hearing children, to teachers of deaf preschoolers, and to grandparents. I shall present views of each group in reviewing these books. First, the hearing parent with a deaf child: After receiving these books, it is better to encourage the parent to go over the signs with the child's teacher since some signs (like the L sign used for legs) looks the same as the sign for LONG. Also, parents have trouble with word endings. After receiving help from the teacher, the parents proceeded with the books very successfully , and in a few days the deaf child could copy and read most of the materials in the books. Illustrations using things that happen in the home were learned quickly, and those words and signs were retained from day to day. Also, actions identified with the child's own actions were retained much better than actions of the kitten. The kitten book contained words which were difficult for the parent to convey; such as, "to pet, sharp, claws, purr, scratch, rough, ribbon and yarn." One important service I see with these books is that hearing parents seem to learn and retain sign language from this learning experience with their child better than from sign language classes. Second, the deaf parents with hearing children : Because of the...