No abstract

The number of deaf education teacher preparation programs and the number of program graduates were tabulated from reference issues of the American Annals of the Deaf beginning in 1973 and progressing every third year through 2009. Programs and graduates reached their highest levels from the mid-1970s through mid-1980s. In 2006 and 2009, only about one fourth as many students were majoring in deaf education in relation to the general U.S. college population as in 1973, 1976, and 1979. Yet because the population of children identified as deaf and hard of hearing has also declined, the ratio of program graduates to deaf children has stayed relatively balanced for the past 20 years. Current challenges faced by teacher preparation programs include increases in interpreter preparation programs and programs for teaching American Sign Language, as well as the changing nature of the role of teacher of the deaf.

College and university requirements for undergraduate deaf education teacher preparation programs from 1986 and 2006 were compared. Thirty percent fewer undergraduate programs were in existence in 2006 than in 1986. Compared to programs in the 1986–1987 academic year, programs in 2006–2007 placed less emphasis on course work related to speech and hearing and more emphasis on the development of sign language skills. These findings are discussed in relation to the increasing probability that future employment for program graduates will be in itinerant and resource placements within public schools with children whose hearing losses are less severe than those of children in the past.

Problems in teaching English to older deaf students are noted with computer-based instruction offered as a partial solution. The development and implementation of the Harper College English series (Levels I and II) are discussed in detail. The role played by the teacher and limitations of the computer are also discussed.

Tremaine in 1975 found that bilingual hearing children made gains in native and second 1 anguage comprehension when they reached the concrete operational level. Building upon this finding, the present study examined the linguistic and cognitive skills of 59 severe-to-profound and profoundly deaf children between the ages of seven and 12. Through manually coded English, students were administered four Pi ageti an operation a 1 tasks in the areas of conservation, classification, seriation, and numeration and a test of syntactic comprehension. Students and teachers were also given a sociolinguistic questionnaire to determine the hearing status of the child 1 s parents, the age the child learned signs, and the sign consistency at home. Teachers and students showed a high degree of agreement in their responses to this questionnaire.Results indicated that operational deaf children performed significantly better than non-operational deaf children on the test of syntactic comprehension, although both groups of children had poorer English skills and a lower rate of operational thinking than did the younger hearing students in Tremaine•s sample. A relationship was found among operational thinking, age, and IQ of the subjects as well as between age and syntactic skills, but no relationship was indicated between syntactic skills and IQ.Students whose parents consistently signed to them showed greater English syntactic comprehension than did students whose parents signed less consistently. Children with more consistent sign exposure at home also tended to have more advanced operational skills, though not to a statistically significant degree. In both operational level and English syntactic skills, a slight advantage was found for those children using American Sign Language at home rather than manually coded English. This finding may be explained by the greater degree of sign consistency likely to be experienced by those children whose deaf parents use American Sign Language. Finally, a multiple regression analysis indicated that over half of the total variability on the test of syntactic comprehension could be predicted from success or failure on two of the operational tasks (numeration and seriation) and the child's overall signing ability, with age and IQ much poorer predictors of English skills.