A Cooperative Bilingual Language Program for Deaf Adolescents

In 1986, the authors were assigned to teach a group of students who expressed themselves most efficiently in American Sign Language (ASL). Because our methods of teaching them English were not effective, we explored other methods of teaching. The students who participated in the program are severely to profoundly deaf and of normal or higher intelligence (WISC-R, Weschler 1972); they were 14 or 15 at the start and are 18 or 19 now. All have hearing parents. Their greater proficiency in ASL than in written or spoken English was determined by formal and informal means. The entire program—its philosophy, methods, assessment measures, and data—cannot be described in a journal article. Hence we have chosen to focus upon initial steps that provided the students access to English via print. We describe here only some aspects of a much more comprehensive language program in keeping with recent theory; e.g. (Graves 1983, Nippold 1988, Cummings 1989, Cummings 1990).