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Trends in the,YIOf)res5 Toward BiU1}fJuaL Educalwnjorrneqf chililren in rnenmarK BRITTA HANSEN he linguistic situation in the Danish deaf community is very complex. Although in recent years deaf people have defined themselves as a linguistic minority, with Danish Sign Language (DSL) as their primary language and Danish as their second language, no deaf person actually masters the spoken language fluently. The bilingualism we find in the deaf community will always be different from the bilingualism we may find among hearing people, owing to deaf people's inevitable handicap of not being able to hear, lipread, or even speak the majority culture's language with a great degree of fluency. So, however idealistic we might be when setting up the goals for the bilingual education of deaf children, we will-in order to respect the identity of any deaf personalso have to modify our expectations and teaching methods when it comes to teaching deaf children a second language that was developed for a sense they do not have. Our definition of a bilingual deaf adult must, therefore, exclude the requirement of being able to speak a language. We call deaf people bilingual if they are fluent signers of DSL and able to read and write the Danish language. Bilingual deaf persons will be able to use whichever language they feel most comfortable with. When they converse with deaf friends or hearing people who know DSL, they will use this language. When they converse with hearing people, they might write Danish on paper, speak and listen through an interpreter, or use speech if it is intelligible. When communicating with hearing people who speak and sign at the same time, they might choose to use a pidgin form of DSL, which is very different from the native DSL, but more intelligible to the hearing person because this pidgin form relies heavily upon the Danish spoken language . So most deaf people function linguistically on a continuum ranging from the use of pure DSL, through use of pidgin forms that are mixtures of DSL and Danish, to the use of Danish spoken or written language. When it comes to using the Danish language in both its spoken and written forms, however, most deaf adults have severe problems. Research by the British psychologist R. Conrad (1979) showed that 30 percent of the deaf fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who A revised version of this paper, which was originally presented at The Deaf Way, was later presented at the International Congress on Sign Language Research and Application, March 23-25, 1990, in Hamburg. That version has been printed in Sign LAnguage Research and Application, edited by Siegmund Prillwitz and Tomas VoJlhaber, 1990, Hamburg, Germany: SIGNUM·Press. 606 THE DEAF WAY ~ Education left school were illiterate, and less than 10 percent could read at an appropriate age level. Their lipreading abilities were equally unsatisfactory, and only one-fourth of all students had speech that could be understood by their own teachers. We have also seen these alarming results in Denmark during the years when classroom teaching was carried out using mainly the monolingual approach. Teachers have struggled, but they have never been able to teach the average deaf child the language of the majority to anything near a level satisfactory for daily communication with hearing people. As a result, deaf people have not acquired the social, cognitive, and academic skills to become fully integrated members of society. They have been excluded and isolated, their potential neglected, because the educational system has focused primarily on their disability and not on their strengths. They have become stigmatized as individuals and as a group. From Total Communication to Bilingualism In the late 1960s, changes started occurring within the education of deaf students in Denmark. Total Communication, or the Simultaneous Method, using Danish spoken language supported by visual means such as signs, fingerspelling, and the mouth-hand system (a phonetic aid to help lipreading and articulation) was introduced in some of the early intervention programs and most of the schools for deaf students. It soon became the method of teaching deaf children language, as well as social and academic skills. Parents and teachers generally claimed that their communication with the deaf children improved tremendously. Suddenly through visual means, deaf children were able to take part in conversations-and they were able to communicate their questions, emotions, and needs through an individually created linguistic system. However, alhough the communication between deaf children and their surrounding hearing community improved drastically, their Danish...

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