Letters to the Editor

Comments, Questions, and Answers Alan B. Crammatte Editor, Comments The Comment, Question, and Answer department is published as a service to professional readers and parents of deaf children. It is an attempt to provide practical information on the basic aspects of deafness, particularly in relation to education. Although all questions submitted cannot be used, those considered to be of greatest interest to readers will be published. Answers are prepared by competent authorities. Material submitted must contain the writer's name and address. Address questions and comments to: Alan B. Crammatte, 897 Windsong Dr., Arnold, Md. 21012 Letters to the Editor To the Editor: Fortunately for the profession, increased attention is now being given to those characteristics of manual English systems that may affect the learning of English by hearingimpaired children. Since most signs take longer to execute than "parallel" words to voice, the user of a simultaneous system can delete some signs, combine signs in an idiosyncratic way, use ASL constructions, modify the way she speaks, or perform any combination of the above. The purpose of the communication is also an overriding consideration. Does the speaker-signer wish to model English for the child or does she wish to communicate comfortably , information to her listener-viewer(s)? At earlier ages, modeling English appears to be the more dominant purpose. At the secondary school level, communication of information often appears to be the more important purpose . Among many other important differences between a primary school and a high school communication situation are (a) speech rates, (b) message complexity, (c) English and ASL competencies of the students, (d) the students' language learning capabilities, and (e) a host of social and psychological variables that affect learners at different ages, especially adolescents . Readers of this journal should be wary of any study that purports to make general recommendations about the use or non-use of manual English that does not take into account in some way the variables mentioned above. AU of the above is by way of introduction to some comments about "The Grammaticality of Manual Representations of English in Classroom Settings" by Dr. Thomas N. Kluwin, which appeared in the June issue of this journal. Rather than focus upon detailed technical problems of the study, I will describe its basic logic and note how it does not support the conclusions and recommendations drawn. Essentially , Kluwin collected cross-sectional data using the method of contrasted groups. Three groups from secondary programs in schools for the deaf were observed: inexperienced teachers (less than four years classroom signing experience ), experienced teachers (more than four years), and deaf teachers. "One school used a specific sign system for representing English; one advocated 'total communication/ and the third had recently changed from oral methods to 'total communication'." Kluwin states that "two things occur within the contrived signing systems (italics added). First, the cumbersome elements that are based on English structures are deleted. Later with increasing contact with the natural language, the more efficient natural language elements are introduced into the classroom signing." This is a surprising conclusion since two of the three schools are not described as even advocating a "contrived signing system." Further, schools don't use specific systems. Teachers do. There is no evidence that any teachers in these schools were trained in a specific system or even used it at any time in A.A.D. I August 1981 483 Letters to the Editor their careers, much less modified its use through experience in the classroom. The article reports nothing about these matters. Hence, its findings shed no light on what may happen to contrived systems in classroom use. There are two further points that should be made about studies that attempt to evaluate manual English systems when used with adolescents and adults. English, as a communication medium, has a large number of inherently redundant features, many of which can be omitted without markedly affecting communication accuracy. For example, it is possible to omit almost all determiners and still be understood the vast majority of the time. This is what is commonly done with signs, and this kind of omission would, in and of itself, cause a high deletion rate. Second, spoken or conversational English...