The Importance of Coupling Writing with Signing
Learning TipsI know, you never thought you would hear me ("The Man in the Blue Shirt") say that deaf children are signing too much, right? Well I say it only in perspective of comparing their signing skills to their writing skills.
I think there are often times in the field of Deaf Education that the parents, teachers and interpreters that are working with the deaf and hard of hearing population are just so excited that the children are beginning to express themselves through sign, that they don’t want to “slow them down” by making them think about putting these concepts they are signing into a written form. It doesn’t help that sign language itself is language that is presented “in the air” and that American Sign Language does not have a written word for word counterpart that goes along nicely with English. This is all the more reason for people working with our deaf and hard of hearing population to take the time to directly teach these skills to our students.
The written language is the way they will present themselves to the public through resumes, cover letters, notes and even social media. Like it or not, the skills that you show through your written exchanges with people help them to determine your grasp of the English language and to many, rightfully or not, your intelligence. Anyone who works with the deaf population knows that the link between intelligence and writing ability doesn't always go hand-in-hand, but that is the perception of the general public.
There are many ways to help students work on their writing skills. We have discussed a few of them before in previous blogs but I would like to hear more from our friends out there with the practices they are using currently to foster better writing skills amongst their deaf and hard of hearing students. Please post your comments below. Let's see what we can come up with as some innovative and creative ways to help out the population we love to serve.
Related previous blog posts:
- Turn an Ordinary Children's Book into a Creative Sign Language Learning Tool
- Creating a Deck of Printed Flash Cards
- Fostering communication between school and home at the elementary level
- Fostering communication between school and home at the middle school level
- Fostering communication between school and home at the high school level
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jazTuesday, August 6, 2013
Having spent most of my career trying to get college students majoring in computer science to take writing seriously I have a lot of sympathy with this point of view. However ...
I think writing involves a whole different language than ASL. You are really asking deaf kids to be bilingual. This is not a bad thing. Many children around the world grow up bilingual and it seems to be good for them. But there is no denying it is somewhat more difficult to learn two languages than just one.
Learning to write for a kid who thinks in ASL is not the same as learning to write for a kid who thinks in English. Yes, written English is somewhat different than spoken English but the difference is one of dialect, not language. For the ASL speaker it is a difference of langage. ASL has a different sentence structure and treats pronouns in a wildly different way. It seems to me like one of those weird languages one might encounter in a linguistics class that permits complex verb forms with subject and object built in.
I know a deaf couple whom I see from time to time. Their emails to me have the feel of what I'm learning to do in ASL. I feel I have to be careful in how I say things when I write to them. That is what has gotten me interested in the difficulties of learning both ASL and English.
All this has me thinking that one of my retirement projects might be to translate some English stories into an ASL-ized version. I don't mean using one of the write-ASL-on-paper methods that have been developed. My goal would not be to describe ASL but to write in a hybrid language that speakers of both ASL and English could learn without too much difficulty.
Such a hybrid might be used to bring deaf children to English.
Or maybe not. One problem with my opinion is that I am still a long way from being fluent in ASL. I also have little concept of what it is like to grow up deaf. Maybe it is better to teach reading and writing English as a foreign language. One that is close enough to ASL that fluency could be obtained in a school setting.
Thoughts anybody?