Language Teacher Training for Native Signers: A Pilot Program at the University of New Brunswick

LANGUAGE TEACHER TRAINING FOR NATIVE SIGNERS: A PILOT PROGRAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK Kathryn Harley It is a given in second language training that the best people to teach a language are those fluent in it. In the case of sign language, though, those most fluent in the language, deaf persons, have rarely instructed the vast majority of those who want to learn the language, the hearing. An innovative program at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton, NB, Canada set about changing that in the summer of 1987. Funded by Employment and Immigration Canada under its "innovations" program, and staffed by both Canadian and American specialists in the field, this program was organized by UNB's Department of Extension and Summer Session, in cooperation with the New Brunswick Coordinating Council on Deafness. It had two objectives: 1 To develop a fully documented program to train deaf people to teach sign language to hearing people; 2 To train a group of deaf people who would be able at the program's conclusion to teach sign language at either master instructor or assistant instructor levels. The benefits of the training were expected to be two-fold: (a) the participants as members of a group traditionally with high levels of unemployment would be able to obtain full-time or part-time work as instructors, and (b) future sign language programs and courses at UNB and elsewhere would have available competent instructors fluent in sign language. It is estimated that more than one million people in Canada and the United States use American Sign Language (ASL). Though there are some regional differences (comparable to dialects or "accents" difference in spoken language), the substantial core of the language is common through the U.S. and Canada. Sign language has been used for centuries but only in the last thirty years has ASL been analyzed and documented by linguists; hence only recently have the hearing, and the deaf, communities begun to understand its nature: that it is not a simple @ 1989, Linstok Press, Inc. See note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 translation of speech into signs but a language with its own grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure. Among hearing people a growing awareness of the deaf culture in their midst has been prompted by human rights and equal opportunity legislation and the promotion of the customs and cultures of minority groups during the last few decades. One result has been a proliferation of ASL courses; an increasing number of hearing people want to be able to communicate directly with the deaf. Sign language instruction is now offered by school boards, community colleges, churches, and university departments of continuing education; but quantity and demand have not always resulted in quality. For the most part, administrators are unfamiliar with sign language and have no way to gauge the competence of its instructors. The situation is analogous to that of a uni-lingual anglophone hiring an English-speaking person, who claims knowledge of French but has no academic credentials to teach the language. The administrator in either case does not know, and the students do not know, if what is being taught bears much relation to the language that they want to learn. With ASL the problem is compounded by a measure of prejudice: the hearing world tends to assume that the deaf are of limited intelligence and that their language is simple, low-level, and easily taught and learned. Consequently, the question of an instructor's knowledge of the language and degree of teaching skill has too often been given inadequate consideration. The result has been that countless hearing students graduate from sign language classes taught by hearing people with a set of signs that mean little or nothing to the deaf people with whom they want to communicate. The program The UNB's sign language instructor training program developed from the simple belief that it makes sense to have people fluent in sign language teaching those who want to learn it. Those most fluent in the language, naturally, are deaf persons, but it was continually astonishing to the program's organizers that this obvious fact had been overlooked. To the best...