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Achieving Human Rights Educating DeafImmigrant Students from Non-English-Speaking Families in Australia Jan Branson and Don Miller 7 THE RELATIVELY recent opening up of Australia to immigrants from a wide range of non-Western countries, including a wide range of refugees, has created a multicultural society with large numbers of people whose first and often only language is one other than English. This linguistic and cultural diversity has given rise to calls for bilingual education and the recognition of and accommodation to minority languages. Over the last few years, the use of Auslan as a language of instruction in schools and units for deaf students has reemerged. Associated with this trend is a focus on the bilingual education of deaf children through Auslan and English, with Auslan as the primary language of instruction. While the use of sign language in a bilingual classroom is usually seen as the most progressive move in deaf education nationally and internationally discussions of these processes tend to ignore a vital cultural and linguistic characteristic of Australian society a characteristic shared by most societies. Australia is a multicultural, multilingual, immigrant society. The unconscious assumption that there are only two languages involved in dealing with linguistic issues in the education of deaf children-the national spoken language , English, and the national sign language, Auslan-fails to consid.er the multicultural reality. Research into language use in the education of deaf children must consider current research on bilingualism in the education of hearing students in a multilingual environment. This research stresses the need for children from non-English-speaking backgrounds to have access to education through their first language and access to English as a second language (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994). But what about deaf students from non-English-speaking-and even possibly non-Auslan-signing-horne backgrounds? The problems become much more complex. For hearing students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, the parameters of the problem are native spoken language or languages plus dominant spoken language. In the case of deaf students, these parameters are potentially John Flynn was the research assistant for this study. 88 Achieving Human Rights 89 squared-not only native spoken language or languages plus dominant spoken language but also (potentially) native sign language plus dominant sign language. This chapter, therefore, looks at the parameters of the problem of language use in the education of deaf children within their multicultural, multilingual Australian society. It is based on firsthand research into the cultural and linguistic home backgrounds of current deaf students in Australia. Before we can assess these problems, we must look briefly at the background to the education of deaf children in Australia and at the impact of immigration policies on the composition of the Australian Deaf community. THE EDUCATION OF DEAF CHILDREN IN AUSTRALIA The first schools for the deaf were established in 1860 in Sydney and Melbourne by two deaf men, one from Scotland and the other from England. All states had established schools for the deaf by the late 1890s. The language of instruction in the early schools was a sign language based on British Sign Language (BSL), brought by the early deaf migrants. The one exception was in Western Australia, where the Perth school first used American Sign Language with its base in the French system, but quickly came into line with the other states. At that stage, the majority of settlers in Australia were British or Chinese. The country was firmly English in orientation. By the turn of the century all schools except one were using a combined method. As with the rest of most of the world, oralism, which had been tried since the 1880s, gradually became the main method of instruction, and by the 1950s, oralonly schools were in place. The majority of instruction for deaf children, therefore, focused on speech with signed English reserved for oral failures. Sign language continued to be used by the adult Deaf community and in the 1980s, it pushed for a return to the use of sign language in schools for deaf children. The sign language now used by the Deaf community had changed substantially in the previous 150 years, and, although clearly related to BSL, it is now an established language in its own right. Auslan is now increasingly used in preschools and primary and secondary schools, made possible by the use of interpreters, deaf teacher aides, a very few deaf teachers, and a few hearing teachers fluent in Auslan. AUSTRALIAN IMMIGRATION PATTERNS Apart from the...

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