“Chaining" and other links: Making connections between American Sign Language and English in Two Types of School Settings

Abstract

Can skill in a language in a visual modality such as American Sign Language (ASL) contribute to the development of literacy in a spoken language such as English? Are there ways that signing can be used to interact with printed text that helps deaf children make connections to print and consequently, learn to read? What specific practices might users of signed languages engage in to promote an environment for reading development in young deaf children? These are questions very much in the minds of educators, parents, and deaf people themselves. The development of English literacy has been a source of great concern to those with an interest in the education of deaf children. The importance of deaf children learning to at least read and write English in order to participate in the social and economic life of the United States is undisputed. But it is also well accepted that, for whatever reason, a large number of deaf children do not achieve a very high level of reading fluency.The historical focus of ideas about how best to foster the learning of English by deaf children has led to several predominant approaches in classrooms.One focus has been on learning English through speech input via the child's residual hearing or lipreading ability exclusively. Another has been on learning English via visible representations of English in sign, or in other words, creating sign equivalents of English words and, in theory, "signing English". A third theory has been that deaf children can learn English best by reading and writing it. With the primary focus on English input in whatever form above all else, the classrooms of deaf children have been places largely uninformed by knowledge about ASL and the cultural practices of its users. In recent years, there has been much public discussion of how ASL can be "used" to teach English and these ideas have found their way into some classrooms. Although there are a growing number of teachers who are themselves deaf and native users of ASL and teachers who hear but are fluent in ASL, little is known about the specific contexts and types of interactions of their use of ASL in their classrooms.Since a primary goal of schooling for deaf children is the learning of English and the development of reading and writing ability, the juncture between ASL and English in signing deaf children is of particular interest to educators. One reason for the interest in how ASL and English interact is the evidence of good English reading and writing skills among deaf children of ASL signing deaf parents (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000;Geers & Schick, 1988;Mayberry, 1989; Padden, 2000). The frequency of the success that deaf children of deaf families have in learning to read and write English suggests the probability that deaf families where ASL is the primary language must be doing something that provides productive access or experience with English text that enables their deaf children to learn to read and write English well. Regardless of whether this thesis is accepted, there is widespread experimentati...

Deaf children's bimodal bilingualism and education

“…By five years old, they start to see that there is an individual correspondence between a fingerspelt and a written letter (Padden 2006). Another strategy is parents' use of signing in English word order or incorporating English grammatical features in a signed utterance (such as a fingerspelt function word), which is also documented as a teaching strategy in the pedagogical research literature (Humphries & MacDougall 2000). Aside from these linguistic practices, these studies observe the setting, positioning and placement of their signing by deaf parents vis a vis the child and the book, and how they manage this along with touch and non-manual communication to engage and maintain attention and indicate shifts in the activity, add characterisation or emphasis.…”

“…In other examples, bimodal bilingual classroom strategies are documented in detail. Among these, Humphries & MacDougall (2000) provide an informative taxonomy of strategies used by deaf and hearing teachers demonstrating the practice of 'chaining' as one of the ways of making connections between ASL signs, fingerspelling and written English.…”

The Marginalisation of Finely Tuned Semiotic Practices and Misunderstandings in Relation to (Signed) Languages and Deafness

“…Bagga-Gupta (1999 has examined similar complex practices in the context of "visually oriented bilingual arenas" where the languages used are Swedish Sign Language and Swedish. Following Humphries and MacDougall (1999) among others, she calls a microcommunicative use of resources from two languages local chaining where different modes are connected for highlighting equivalencies between languages or for signalling distance between two linguistic/modal resources; for example, a signer can chain a sign language sign to fingerspelling. In my data, we can see a complex, distributed local chaining taking place where several participants chain saying a word in Finnish to saying a word in English, to fingerspelling, to typing, and so on.…”

“…I focused on the chaining of modes, in particular, where modes such as signing, mouthing (i.e. mouth patterns derived from spoken languages), and typing are arranged into a chain of action (Humphries and MacDougall 1999;BaggaGupta 1999BaggaGupta , 2004. My claim was: "It is justified to assume that FinSL signers live in a multimodal world of images and gestures, forming their own pedagogical strategies from their everyday encounters."…”

Why we need signed poetry in bilingual education

“…In all cases the events were filmed and transcribed and the poets gave their permission for the material to be analysed and represented as part of research into sign language literature. There is a great deal of quantitative work that investigates the effectiveness of bilingual approaches in deaf education (HERMANS, 2007;HUMPHRIES;MACDOUGALL, 2000, are two of many) reporting on the "facts" of educational achievement. To complement this broad, generalisable and objective work, I aim to show the human 'voices' -that is, as much of the signed presence as possible -of deaf people who reveal their experience and thoughts (COLEMAN;BRIGGS, 2002).…”