Methods in the Bilingual Component
Hearing students receive linguistic instruction of their native language, English, in school. However, deaf students rarely receive this same type of instruction in their native language, ASL. Furthermore, many deaf students enter the educational setting without a solid first language at all. Therefore, these students especially require direct teaching of ASL. They cannot be left to learn it only from the environment. Hall (1995) and Akamatsu and Armour (1987) noted an absence in the direct teaching of ASL or in the linguistic analysis of ASL or MCE. Akamatsu and Armour (1987) also noted that even teachers who use some ASL in the classrooms may not utilize their own and their students' understanding of ASL to teach English.
Children who have a strong command of ASL as a first language can then transfer that knowledge of language to English. Hall (1995) tested deaf students in writing, story reading, story retelling and response to questions, sign language interviews, and cloze tasks. He found that deaf children used a type of English glossing of ASL which attributed to the students' limited abilities in English structure. he concluded that a bilingual approach of instruction would help students improve their English by enabling them to transfer their understanding of language through ASL to an understanding of the English language.
Akamatsu and Armour (1987) studied the effects of ASL to English translation intervention in deaf students. The intervention consisted of instruction in communication processes, the differences between MCE and ASL, transliteration and translation skills, and English grammar and editing. The students compared English to ASL and practiced writing by translating ASL into written English. After ten weeks, the intervention significantly improved the students' written English grammar. The students also showed understanding of the ability to convey any idea in either ASL or English. The researchers also saw that students could successfully convey their own ideas in English by signing to themselves, translating their own signs, and then editing as needed.
Researchers have also proven positive effects of ASL storytelling for deaf children. ASL storytelling can be used with preschool children to motivate an interest in reading, and it can be used to explain the literature that older children read on their own.
Children who cannot read themselves can benefit from ASL storytelling because it opens the world of books in an accessible and interesting language. Schick and Gale (1995) studied preschool student interactions during storytelling in ASL, in MCE, and in a mixture of ASL and MCE in the same story. The researchers found that students were more likely to interact and initiate interactions when ASL was used. The researchers concluded that using ASL during instruction would increase their interest in communication and their willingness to initiate interactions. Such use of ASL during storytelling could increase the children's motivation to read books (Andrews, Winograd, & DeVille, 1994).
Older students who can read also benefit from ASL storytelling through prereading strategies of ASL summarizations. Andrews, Winograd, and DeVille (1994) studied the effects of this strategy in elementary school students. The teacher summarized fables in ASL without giving the moral of the story before the students read the fables on their own. The students then retold the stories and also told the moral of each fable. The results showed that the ASL summary technique improved the students' ability to retell the stories and to comprehend the moral lessons of the fables. The researchers concluded that the ASL summary technique improved memory and inference tasks.
Methods in the Bicultural Component
Bilingualism in ASL and English naturally lends itself to biculturalism (Deaf and hearing) by opening the hearing society to children through literacy and by making Deaf role models more available (Hall, 1995). However, some programs take a direct approach to cultural education by implementing deaf studies courses.
The deaf curricula at Cleary School for the Deaf in Nesconset, New York, and Kendall Demonstration Elementary School for the Deaf in Washington, DC, emphasize identity, proficiency in ASL, Deaf history, arts and literature of the Deaf Culture, and skills in the use of professional interpreters.
Before schools can implement bicultural programs, educators must have an understanding of both cultures. Sign Talk Centre for Children (STCC), a reverse mainstream program, found that many of the hearing staff members did not even realize that they have a culture. "As majority members, they have rarely had to think about the values and traditions that are part of their culture. Deaf people, as a minority group, are extremely aware of their culture because they have fought so hard for its recognition" (Evans). Therefore, STCC began training in cultural mediation to help bridge the gap between the two cultures and to prepare the staff for cultural issues among the children.
Arguments Against the Bilingual-Bicultural Approach
Several points of opposition confront the bi-bi approach. Among these are a lack of qualified teachers, an unknown standard definition of ASL, research against ASL as a natural language for deaf children, less auditory exposure for children with aural abilities, the possibility of ASL replacing English, disagreement over the use of MCE, and the limited school environments that are conducive to such an approach.
Lack of qualified teachers
The implementation of a bi-bi approach requires a faculty of qualified professionals. However, the availability of qualified teachers is limited due to lack of deaf teachers in the schools and to inadequate ASL skills of hearing teachers.
While many teachers may have positive attitudes toward ASL and the bilingual approach (Haselton, 1990), few have the ability to implement this approach into their programs. A basic assumption of bilingual education is that the teacher is proficient in both ASL and English. However, few native signers are teachers. In a 1993 article, Andrews and Jordan reported that only 16% of teachers of the deaf are deaf themselves. They attribute this lack of deaf teachers to little recruitment of deaf students into teacher education programs and inequitable Graduate Record Examination (GRE) requirements and teacher competency examinations. Furthermore, many of those teachers who are deaf teach in vocational departments and in content areas other than reading and language (Andrews, Winograd, & DeVille, 1994).
While hearing teachers cannot be expected to have native fluency in ASL, they rarely have any abilities in ASL. Andrews, Winograd, and DeVille (1994) noted that most teacher education programs require candidates for certification to take only two or fewer sign language classes. Therefore, hearing teachers are not prepared to teach in ASL.
Unknown standard definition of ASL
Bilingual education depends upon proficiency in ASL. While much progress has occurred over linguistic analysis of ASL, much debate continues over what exactly defines ASL. Seal (1991) studied deaf and hearing signers' ability to distinguish between ASL and English signing. Deaf and hearing observers were classified by years of experience signing. Observers viewed a videotape of conversations and were told that two of the four children in the conversations were from ASL homes and two from SSS homes. Observers were asked to decide which mode of signing each child in the videotape was using and to explain why they came to these decisions. Five sign language specialists watched the conversations and served as criterion judges to which observer judgements were compared. Seal found that years of experience did not significantly affect scores. Except for one case, the deaf signers showed no significant difference in ability to recognize ASL signing than the hearing observers. Therefore, the results showed that a standard definition of ASL is not widely known among signers.
Research against ASL as a natural language for deaf children
Eagney (1987) found that deaf children understand ASL, English signing, and simplified English equally well, and both younger and older children equally understand the three languages. She concluded that ASL is not a natural language for the deaf, because ASL was not better understood than the two forms of English. Eagney reasoned that if ASL were a natural language for the deaf, "younger children would automatically understand it better, and older children, having been trained in English, would not." However, the results of this research did not find this to be true. Eagney also reasoned that the more linguistically-sophisticated older children would have an even better grasp of a natural language, ASL, than of English. However, this did not prove to be true either.
However, since deaf children do not receive formal teaching of ASL (which hearing children do of their native language, English) and since they do not receive consistent models of ASL to which they can compare their own signing and with which they can either consciously or subconsciously analyze and test their own assumptions about ASL, older children do not improve their understanding of ASL as readily as hearing children improve in their native language.
Less auditory exposure for children with auditory abilities
Some teachers believe that "using ASL all the time would be cheating some students out of an opportunity to be exposed to English, especially those students who can make use of their residual hearing" (La Bue, 1995). After all, the students with the most hearing often do better academically than other students (La Bue, 1995). The reason for this is obvious: if the only input from the teacher that is accessible to any of the children is in an aural mode, only the students with aural abilities will succeed. The purpose of the bilingual-bicultural approach is to make instruction accessible to all students regardless of auditory ability. Furthermore, all current bi-bi programs continue to provide intensive aural/oral training for their students. This area is not neglected in the bilingual approach; it is only separated from academic achievement.
ASL could replace English
La Bue (1995) studied a hearing teacher of the deaf dn the fourteen year old deaf students in her class. In the study, La Bue took an interactive approach to testing the teacher's philosophies of education and communication and to comparing the teacher's understanding of language and cognition in deaf students with her actual practices. She found that teachers who use ASL summaries tend to give students credit for understanding the written story when, in fact, the children have relied on the teacher's signing of the story.
Disagreement over the use of MCE
Some proponents of a bi-bi approach believe MCE can and should be used as a mode of communicating in English (Mounty, 1986; Paul & Quigley, 1987). However, some theorists in the approach (Johnson, Liddell, & Erting, 1989) and several current bi-bi programs believe MCE should not be used at all. Literature from The Learning Center (TLC) for Deaf Children in Framingham, MA, states, "TLC staff take care to keep the two languages [ASL and English] separate so that they provide a pure and clear language model both in ASL and in English." Communication guidelines from Sign Talk Children's Centre (STCC) in Manitoba, Canada, instruct teachers to "not speak and sign at the same time. Simultaneously speaking and signing can appear to save time, but it is at the expense of one (and usually both) of the languages" (Evans).
Bilingual-bicultural approaches only possible in segregated environments
Because the bi-bi approach emphasizes interactive communication in the educational environment, mainstream programs cannot adequately implement such an approach. Therefore, bi-bi programs are restricted to residential and day schools for the deaf. Currently, only 29% of deaf and hard of hearing students attend these types of schools (Schildroth & Hotto, 1996).
ASL may be difficult for parents to learn
While ASL may be easier than MCE for deaf children to learn, it is easier for hearing parents and teachers to learn a new modality (sign) of the language they already know (English) than to learn an all new language (ASL) in a modality they have never used (sign). Some educators may feel that ease of communication for the parents and teachers is more important than ease of comprehension for the child (La Bue, 1995). In which case, MCE would be used in the home.
Conclusion
The bi-bi approach, though relatively new, has received much attention from professionals in the field of deaf education. More importantly, overwhelming support for a return to ASL in the classroom has risen from the Deaf Community. However, research in this area is limited. Therefore, a need for further research exists, especially in the areas of effective placement, methods, and evaluation. On-going assessment of current bi-bi programs needs to be widely available for others to examine and follow. Without such research, this promising approach could lose support and therefore fail at the sake of deaf children.
