Prospects for Teaching English Det + N Structures to Deaf Students

PROSPECTS FOR TEACHING ENGLISH Det + N STRUCTURES TO DEAF STUDENTS PaulCrutchfield A teacher who was tackling a graduate course in language development of the deaf asked her class the following question: "Do you all know the morphological rules of English?" One of the class members asked for a bit of clarification: "Do you mean," she asked; " 'Do we know the morphological rules of English,' or 'Can we recite them?' "Of course, the answers to the student's two questions at that stage of the course would probably have been , respectively, "Yes" and "No". The point here is that anyone who communicates in his native language (and a few other sets of rules, besides), well before the time he reaches puberty. What goes on in language classes in public schools is mainly polishing the students' language usage, usually by teaching an entire textbook series of rules. While this procedure seems to work with some degree of success for hearing students, the same is not true for deaf students. The problems that deaf students have with English are painfully evident; and it is my opinion that the real problem lies in many educators' failure to realize that English is not the native language of a profoundly deaf child. Teachers and deaf students struggle through years of classes trying to impart and learn, respectively, the rules of English, generally as they are taught to hearing students. Meanwhile, the deaf students become more and more proficient in the language of signs-their native language-outside the classroom. They polish, as it were, their usage of the rules they have come to learn from deaf parents, or from other deaf students who sign-all without the benefit of textbooks and teachers. This paper is directed to the teaching of English (specifically, to the teaching of some classes of nouns and their determiners) to deaf students Prospects For Teaching English Det + Structures who have reached the secondary level. I am working on the assumption that by this time the deaf student has become a proficient user of American Sign Language (ASL). This is, in a way, neglecting one of the largest problems, that of the need to recognize and utilize the deaf child's native language during his early education. But (even if immediate innovations in the teaching of deaf children were effected) there are still large numbers of deaf students who have a limited period of formal education remaining, in which they would profit by becoming more proficient in English. Zellig Harris (1954) provides a formula for establishing the minimal structural differences between two languages. Basically, it is as follows: The minimum structural differences between languages A and B is the sum (A- B) + (B-A): (A- B) is the group of structures found in A but not in B; and (B- A) is the group of structures found in B but not in A. It would seem that most current methods of teaching English to deaf students are unilateral. That is, what is taught is (StructureEna StructureASL . This may work for structural elements common to Toth languages, but two sets of structures are thereby neglected: often, the student will fail to understand, much less learn, structures that are unique to English, and he will apply structural elements to English that are unique to ASL. This statement calls for continued rigorous research of ASL, and the utilization of those results to teach English through ASL. This would ultimately lead to the use of (StrASL - StrEn) in teaching (StrEng StrASL. Working from some research in both languages with which I am most familiar, I have prepared an example of what I have called for above. The chief source of theory relating to English nouns and determiners is Chafe (1968) secondarily Yotsukura (1967). Their classifications of English nouns led to the preparation of a means for gathering a small amount of similar data concerning nouns in ASL. Acknowledgement for data on ASL goes to fifteen ASL informants, all students at Gallaudet College. The following information about ASL was gathered from these informants: Sign Language Studies 1. The countn) feature is present in ASL. 2. Some (+count) nouns in ASL differ from those in English. 3. (+plural) features...