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EDITORIAL NEW APPROACH TO LANGUAGE Teaching English to deaf students as a second language has been tried informally over a period of many years. During the last two decades Edna Adler has written on the approach applied to severely impaired deaf adults. Goldberg at Gallaudet College has worked extensively on the technique with deaf college students. Now an entire educational program consisting of textbooks, videotapes, and lesson plans has been developed by a group of linguistseducators (O'Rourke, Padden, Humphries). These materials approach the task in a highly sophisticated way incorporating an in-depth understanding of the syntax of American Sign Language and the relationship of this to the structure of English. Publisher and coauthor, T.J. O'Rourke, is now attempting to do the pilot research on the approach in Louisiana. It is obviously too soon to come to any definitive conclusion about the efficiency of the method at this time. However, it is theoretically sound and intellectually fascinating. Those involved in teaching English to deaf students will want to take an in-depth look at what O'Rourke and colleagues are doing. College programs in teacher preparation will be offering workshops using the O'Rourke materials. For psycholinguists, learning theorists, and educators the theory underlying O'Rourke's efforts should generate extensive research efforts. LITERATURE AND PSYCHOLOGY Good literature far exceeds psychology in the understanding of human behavior. Nowhere is this more evident than in Children of a Lesser God, the award winning Broadway play portraying a deaf woman's struggle to cope in a hearing environment. Joanne Greenberg's novel, In This Sign, and two current plays, Tales of a Clubroom and The White Hawk, are other powerful statements on the human condition as it manifests when a person is deaf. These plays need to be made available to deaf youth and adults in signed or captioned films or videotapes . The plays and the novel represent some of the few available statements of the culture and/or art of deaf people. Incidentally, there is some hope now that In This Sign will be made into a feature length film. THE REAGAN-STOCKMAN PROPOSALS By the time this editorial reaches you Congress and the President should have come to some resolution on the changes to be made in educational and vocational rehabilitation services for deaf people. Should the Reagan-Stockman proposals have gone through in their original form, deaf people will soon be set back to where they were in the World War II era. In other words, vocational rehabilitation for deaf people would essentially end. Because education was more established by World War II, it would be less devastated, but still severely hurt. To some extent we have "do-gooders" in deafness to blame for part of the backlash embodied in the Reagan-Stockman proposals. In major aspects of legislation, such as P.L. 94142 and the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (with revisions), fiscally irresponsible Utopian fantasies were incorporated. The predictable backlash is upon us. McCay Vernon Editor 492 A.A.O. I August 1981 ...

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