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Teaching Reading in Sign Bilingual Approach Within a traditional approach to reading instruction for Deaf children, the child has to learn to speak first. Psychologically speaking there is logic in this – the development of speech offers an underlying representation system for the development of reading. Children who speak can internalise that speech as a way to support the decoding of letter shapes as recognisable words. However, the whole point is that many children do not learn to speak and for them the internal encoding system is not available. They never learn to comprehend joined up words. The first step in evolving an approach has been to find alternative codes – visual and then more recently sign language. Total Communication A first step in addressing the literacy problem has been the combination of speech and signing to offer a means to represent words on the hands. Johnson, Liddell and Erting (1989) in what has become a classic paper, analysed and rejected the use of signed English as a means to communicate in school and as a way to support learning. Signed English messages were simply not intelligible in either language and the results which had supported TC approaches to reading were largely discounted. The initial improvement in reading performance reported in the early 1980s can probably be put down to the release of communicative competence which the change from oralism allowed. The reality is that it has not greatly improved Deaf children’s reading. Sign Bilingualism As a first step, the introduction of sign language meant that teachers were recognising the importance of this language. In effect, this can be said to be a first step to heritage teaching and acceptance of the competence of the Deaf child. However, the first step in reading instruction was still towards approaches which were already well known – English as a Second Language. However, approaches of that sort rely on spoken competence as the underpinning of reading. Approaches for Deaf children have to be different. Swanwick (1998) (in Gregory et al) suggests that “ (Cummins 1991,1994) … proposes that the most appropriate route to bilingualism in Deaf children involves using the learner’s well developed skills in sign language as a basis for developing literacy skills in the second language. It is suggested that in this way literacy skills in the second language can be achieved without exposure to the spoken form (Johnson et al, 1989).” P 111-2 The difficulty with the approach is that it assumes first language literacy in (sign) language – which of course does not occur in Deaf children. Swanwick (1998) however, points to 2 advantages of the sign bilingualism approach – first that the teaching is in sign language and the second is that sign language can form the basis of the meta linguistic skills needed to support reading. However the second point is an article of faith rather than a verifiable result. She examines various studies which use video descriptions (Schneiderman, 1986) and linguistic analysis (Neilson & Armour, 1983) which require the close working of Deaf and hearing instructors. Others have considered the use of meta linguistic tasks – analysing texts in ASL (Neuroth-Gimbrone & Logodioce, 1990). In the approaches in Sweden and Denmark, the deaf children are expected to be able to use analytical skills in sign language as a basis of the application of the skills to spoken language. Mahshie (1995) describes the use of video texts and written texts which are dealt with by contrastive analysis and discussion. This is a means to allow children to reflect on the similarities and differences in the languages. These approaches draw on views of second language learning but substitute meta linguistic and contrastive analysis for the more usual use of spoken competence in the second language. There are as yet few research studies which examine these approaches. |
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