Literacy in Emerging Sign Language Communities

Gagne, Deanna; Coppola, Marie

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197508268.013.25

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The use of LST in the classroom is minimal or absent and teachers do not have any training in LST. Gagne and Coppola (2021) report these similar problems with emerging SLs where SL is not institutionalized either because an inferior sociolinguistic status, or simply because a lack teaching professionals fluent in SL. Such infrastructural problems are still underscored even in countries where SL instruction was institutionalized several decades ago (Dalle, 2003).…”

Section: Tunisian Contextmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Such infrastructural problems are still underscored even in countries where SL instruction was institutionalized several decades ago (Dalle, 2003). Gagne and Coppola (2021) explain that in the case of emerging SLs, various environmental factors have a direct impact on the patterns of development. SL sustainment, institutionalization and dissemination are dependent on the size of the deaf population, the availability of SL in school, and the sociopolitical support for the provision of qualified teachers, interpreters, and the necessary resources.…”

Section: Tunisian Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Preliminary Considerations on the Development of a Bicultural Trilingual Education Model for Deaf Children in the Tunisian Context

2022

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Deaf educational methods have been the subject of controversy among advocates of the oralist and the bilingual approaches for centuries. Over the past decades, the bilingual-bicultural method has proved its effectiveness in facilitating formal school learning and downscaling a higher rate of illiteracy compared to the hearing population. The bilingual-bicultural model in Western countries is designed and implemented in predominantly monolingual contexts or multilingual contexts with a dominant majority language. It aims at providing deaf learners with a simultaneous dual access to the deaf and hearing cultures through sign language and the written form of the majority spoken language. The objective of this dual access is to create a balanced form of bilingualism which will reinforce literacy development. In the Western context, the relative proximity of the written and spoken forms of the majority language allows the written form to function as a means of access to the socio-cultural heritage of the hearing community and to develop a sufficient degree of autonomy in a world where literacy became crucial. The application of the Western bilingual-bicultural model may at first glance seem tempting to mitigate a significant rate of illiteracy affecting 98% of the deaf Tunisian population. However, the diglossic situation in Tunisia, and in the Maghreb countries in general, rests upon the existence of two linguistic forms exhibiting considerable linguistic differences. On one hand, the Tunisian Dialectal Arabic (TDA) is the spoken form, and is the vehicle for the Tunisian socio-cultural heritage transmission. On the other hand, the written form, Modern Standard Arabic (AMS), assumes the role of institutional and literacy language. This particular situation requires a specific educational framework different from the classical bilingual-bicultural approach. We hypothesize that without taking into account Tunisian Dialectal Arabic, learners will not access the Tunisian hearing culture. This situation will potentially hinder literacy development in Modern Standard Arabic. Our article puts forward a trilingual-bicultural educational model adapted to the Tunisian diglossic situation. It includes TSL, and written ADT, as representatives of the deaf and hearing cultures which will both contribute to a more fluid development in a third language, written MSA, as the literacy language.

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Section: Tunisian Contextmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Tunisian Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preliminary Considerations on the Development of a Bicultural Trilingual Education Model for Deaf Children in the Tunisian Context

2022

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Lexical overlap in young sign languages from Guatemala

Horton

2022

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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In communities without older standardized sign languages, deaf people develop their own sign languages and strategies for communicating. This analysis draws on data from a lexical elicitation task completed by deaf people living in Nebaj, a town in Guatemala. Some deaf signers in Nebaj have deaf relatives or deaf peers they interact with daily, while others are the only deaf signer in their immediate communicative ecology. This analysis uses the Jaccard similarity index to quantify lexical overlap at two scales: the wider linguistic community and local sign ecologies. Signers who interact with other deaf signers have higher rates of lexical overlap with signers from the surrounding community than signers who do not know other deaf signers. When signers have frequent sustained interactions with the other signers in their immediate communicative ecology, they have higher rates of overlap within their local ecology than the wider community. This adds to a growing literature that suggests that interaction is a primary driver of convergence on shared lexical forms within communities of language users. Unique features of the communicative histories of signers of young sign languages are also discussed as factors that contribute to variable rates of lexical overlap in this community.

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Literacy in Emerging Sign Language Communities

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Preliminary Considerations on the Development of a Bicultural Trilingual Education Model for Deaf Children in the Tunisian Context

Preliminary Considerations on the Development of a Bicultural Trilingual Education Model for Deaf Children in the Tunisian Context

Lexical overlap in young sign languages from Guatemala

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