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sfenLaYl{Juage lGeSearch £n Genna11(j GUDULA LIST e are delighted that no one has objected to a group from German-speaking countries taking part in The Deaf Way. After all, it is OUT tradition, the "German Method," that has created such burdens for deaf communities. Special education for deaf people is still largely oralistic in Germanspeaking nations. Efforts on our part to correct this situation are long overdue, so I am glad to be able to report that interdisciplinary research on sign language is making some progress, although this progress is slow. In this paper, I will present an overview of the educational use of sign language and sign language research in Germany at the present time. In the area of special education, four universities in western Germany offer academic studies for teachers at schools for deaf students and others working in deaf education: Cologne, Hamburg, Heidelberg, and Munich. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), there are a few places as well, and what I report here for western Germany seems to apply in an even more pronounced way to the GDR. Only a few years ago, the former teacher training institutions became integrated into universities, but they still focus predominantly on traditional pedagogy. Research, when it is done at all, focuses more on the methodology and technology of teaching than on basic research on deafness. Indeed, technology and medicine, with their supply of hearing aids, are more prominent partners of special education for deaf students than are sociology and psychology of language, which certainly would be more useful for examining the appropriateness of oralistic education. Courses in sign language are part of the curriculum, although often not compulsory, and most of these courses teach signed German rather than German Sign Language. For the most part, they are by far less efficient than courses taught in some other countries. Thus, in general, academic studies prepare future educators for a rather traditional, oralistic sort of teaching, both inside and outside the schools for deaf students. It is true that a great many teachers in training are open minded about sign language and the communication needs of the children they will teach. But this is by no means a guarantee that strategies of education within these schools will change. Many new teachers finally submit to the governing policy, and those who might be expected to resist often refuse to go into teaching at all. Therefore, no rapid modification can be expected in schooling policy. Neither is change likely to result from within the academic discipline of special education. Like elsewhere in the world, change can only occur through two routes: The first is a growing self-confidence within the deaf community, making deaf people more assured so they Sign Language Research in Germany can claim their rights-especially their right for interpreting. And second is an academic interest in sign language outside of special education-in linguistics, anthropology, cognitive and developmental psychology, and neuropsychology. The linguistic and psycholinguistic debate about language universals clearly is not yet settled in Germany. In part, this has to do with facts that can be explained by sociology of language. The degree of standardization of German Sign Language, and the degree of partiCipation and acceptance by deaf people themselves, cannot be compared with ASL usage in the United States. There are evident consequences of long-lasting suppression of sign language in Germany, and a considerable time lag in consolidation of language levels and regional performance, compared with North America. We are fortunate to have the American scholar, Penny Boyes Braem, helping with her studies of sign language at Basel. [Editor's note: See Boyes Braem, this volume.] We also have the Center for German Sign Language in Hamburg (which, by the way, is not connected with special education for deaf students at the same university). Siegmund Prillwitz and his crew-half of whom are deaf-are working hard at this Center, although they do not receive unanimous support from the outside. We are still behind ·in cataloging and describing sign language, and especially in more elaborate linguistic theory. The burden of such linguistic work, which is really in its infancy, rests almost entirely on the shoulders of the Center of German Sign Language at Hamburg. Work at the Center began in the 1970s. At first, it concentrated on fighting the prejudices about sign language and developing the first educational programs, including signs for families, early education programs, kindergartens, and schools for deaf students. Since the mid...

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