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Editorial A SPECIAL ISSUE ON SIGN COMMUNICATION Sign Language Studies began appearing in 1972, just as signing was beginning to find a place in programs for deaf children in American schools, as one component of several in an educational philosophy called "Total Communication." When success is defined as empowering deaf children leaving school with literacy and general knowledge at or near the level attained by their hearing peers, however, the various new modes of expression and methods of instruction included under the broad label "Total Communication" have not contributed notably to success. Accepting the use of signs, at least in principle, opened classrooms to: 1. The natural language of the adult deaf community, American Sign Language (ASL)-that is classrooms were open to it incase there were teachers who knew and chose to use it; 2. Sign vocabularies, designed to represent particular elements of spoken English so accurately and completely that young deaf children addressed in these signs would automatically gain English language competence; 3. An interlanguage (also variously labeled, see below) that has grown up wherever deaf and hearing people are inconstant contact. The natural language of the adult deaf community in the United States and Canada, ASL, has never been given a chance to prove itself in education. Several reasons have been offered to explain why it has not been used as a medium of instruction. First, there are persons (both deaf and hearing)-with influence in schools and in govern-mental agencies that fund and set standards for schools-who will not yet admit that ASL is a language. From ignorance or from unexamined or aggressively held prejudice, some of them believe that the signing of deaf people is a feeble attempt, foredoomed to failure, to represent a spoken language. They may argue also that "those deaf," who have rejected oral education cannot fully understand English. Others among them, consciously or not, desperately fear to concede that deaf people have a language of their own (and a culture and a right to be deaf and to resist attempts to make them into second-rate imitations of hearing people); for such a concession would seriously endanger their own system of beliefs and even, in many cases, their livelihood. A second reason ASL has not yet become an instructional medium widely used is sheer numbers: too few hearing teachers have acquired it as a comfortably working second language, and too few deaf persons with ASL competence have passed the gatekeepers and attained full teaching status. School authorities, not having on board personnel able to teach in ASL, have naturally not authorized its use inthe classrooms. But a subtler reason ASL has been kept out of classrooms may be its long tradition as an "in-group" language. While even highly educated users of ASL are aware that the most skillful interpreters, and perhaps a few other hearing persons, know ASL well, these deaf persons still tend to use it only among themselves-when hearing persons are not present. Many of them hold the opinion that ASL, while perfectly well suited to the needs of its users Qby Linstok Press, Inc. See note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 within the community, is not an appropriate language for formal education. These deaf people prefer a kind of signing that comes nearer to representing pedagogical English as used by a (hearing or deaf) teacher-of if in use by an interpreter, prefer the interpreter to stay close to English structure and not translate from (formal) English into (intimate) ASL. The second class of signing has gained wide acceptance in schools and classrooms for the deaf, as surveys of educational practice show. The one most widely used is Signing Exact English (SEE2), but there are schools that swear by Seeing Essential English (SEE1), others that use signed Englishm , and still others that "roll their own." One reason for the popularity of sign vocabularies of this kind for representing English may be the ease of learning to use them. Like the pocket calculators that display a word of Language Y when one types in a word of Language X, these invented systems allow hearing parents and teachers simply to store intheir memory a sign...

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