Teaching ASL in the University: One Teacher's Journey

As a college professor in one of the country's few four-year ASL interpreter-training programs, I started my career with the wide-eyed optimism of a rookie who banks on enthusiasm rather than experience. I arrived at the university armed with the methodology that was imparted to me during my years as an undergraduate and later in a master's-level teacher-training program. I realized later that I also arrived with the baggage of a deaf woman who had been educated in a traditional manner.

Teachers of deaf people (who were mostly hearing) traditionally maintained low expectations for their students. Every time a new concept was introduced, the teachers referred to previous lessons, severely slowing down the overall pace. Then there was the addition of speech classes, which often took precedence over the content areas. Teachers would brag that it took seven years, but finally "little Johnny" could say his name. In the years of concentration on correct pronunciation, deaf students were missing out on critical information. This pervasive attitude, along with the low expectations, impacted not only what I expected of myself but also what I came to expect from others.

When my own hearing children entered school, they were educated in a markedly different way in comparison to my own experience. Teachers of hearing students keep "raising the bar" by encouraging them to learn more and thus increase their knowledge. A lesson is taught and completed, and then a new one is introduced; teachers do not constantly refer to prior knowledge. Of course, skills are built on skills, and a strong foundation is established, but the overall motion in my children's classes was forward, and the pace was quick. With deaf children, teachers kept their instructional level low and "taught down" to their students without ever increasing their expectations. When many of us educated in this manner became teachers ourselves, we used this same approach with our own students.

In this article I present a challenge to other teachers of American Sign Language to break the cycle and provide ASL students with the tools to develop in-depth communication skills. Every deaf person can tell a story of being at the mall or supermarket and meeting someone who has taken a sign language class. Because this person can produce only the most superficial conversation, the deaf person courteously stands there for ten minutes in order for this person to introduce himself. Given the right tools, our students can become fluent communicators in a language that has fought long and hard for its due.

As a new teacher, I relied on published texts and prepared curriculums. Several popular series offered training courses for teachers on how to use their materials, and I attended a number of these. However, as I moved through the texts, I was startled to find that, when I used traditional methods of teaching, my students were not realizing the level of success that I had hoped for. It was disheartening to see that their communication skills were still somewhat basic.

This is not offered as a criticism of the available materials. There are actually many fine resources on the market. However, when I tried to follow certain very popular books and series, I found that my students were using them as "vocabulary books" and still following English word order. When I showed a videotaped literature series, my students copied the signs they saw, but their communication skills were not improving. At that point I realized it was time to reevaluate not only the course content but also the fundamental teaching philosophies that I had been following.

The current success with my students is the result of a process of purposeful and systematic experimentation. Teaching for the past eight year has been like a journey that I have undertaken with its fair share of roadblocks and U-turns. Making mistakes, learning from them, and revising my approach has led to the methodology that I now employ in the classroom. My goal is to save other teachers the time-consuming trial-and-error process...