Search

The high degree of comprehensibility between the signed languages in Trieste (present-day Italy) and Austria is very probably due to their joint history of deaf schools within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Investigation undertaken in archives in Trieste and Klagenfurt has revealed interesting similarities in the education of deaf children there since the mid-nineteenth century, which may explain present-day affinities. General background information is provided regarding sign language in Italy and Austria, and a detailed description of schools and teaching methodologies, which are the probable source of a historical connection, is then presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative, longitudinal, single-case study analyzes naturalistic interactions in Swedish Sign Language. Multiple interactions took place mainly between a mother and a deaf twin on twelve occasions. The participants' actions and language structure are examined as the child progressed from ten to forty months of age. The results are presented in three segments: transformations (i.e., types of actions during the sessions); gaze; and structure of utterances. The first segment (when the child was between ten and thirteen months of age) includes mediating utterances that contained a few signs with steady eye contact (i.e., focus on an object with mediating, displaced signing, as from the signers perspective).The second segment (when the child was between fifteen and twenty-four months of age) includes flexible eye contact, multiple phrases, and narrative structure. The third segment comprises conversations that include a dynamic visual contact utilizing nonmanual structures. Mediating factors such as simultaneous tactile looking, mediating vision, and mediating triangles, which may be useful for pedagogical purposes, are emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a correlational study of language and home factors and their role in fostering the development of alphabetic knowledge among a national sample of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old deaf children. A structural equation model was constructed and tested in an examination of the combined impacts of student age, fingerspelling ability, and receptive American Sign Language ability on the participants' ability to write, say, or sign letters of the English alphabet. The resulting models explained more than half of the variance in letter-writing ability and revealed significant independent effects of all three variables. Additionally, ASL skill revealed noteworthy indirect effects through its impact on fingerspelling, emphasizing the importance of the combination of signing and fmgerspelling as predictors of emergent literacy in young deaf children. A follow-up analysis examined the correlations between age and letter writing, as well as those between ASL skill and letter writing, separately for subgroups (defined by parental hearing status and the use of sign in the home). This analysis revealed strong associations between ASL skill and letter writing in signing deaf and hearing families but not in nonsigning hearing families, raising a concern that deaf children in families with no early exposure to a visual language may be at greater risk for delay in their emerging reading abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers of deaf children express concern over a lack of curricular materials appropriate for and beneficial to the deaf population, particularly for language and literacy development and in early childhood classrooms. In addition, more and more deaf children are attending classrooms in which their teachers may not be fluent in ASL. This, too, indicates a need for curricular resources that support and extend language and literacy instruction for deaf children. The current study examines the potential of classroom activities designed to supplement an educational video series in ASL. The participants included one teacher, six deaf children, and one child of a Deaf adult (Coda) in an early childhood classroom. Over the course of two weeks, the teacher showed the participants an educational video and implemented six supplemental activities, all of which were designed to promote a set of early literacy skills (e.g., vocabulary, knowledge of story elements, sequencing ability). Each activity was video-recorded and transcribed for childrens displays of literacy-related behaviors. The teacher also filled out a survey in order to provide feedback on the usability and effectiveness of the activities. The findings suggest that the children displayed many of the targeted skills during the classroom activities, and the descriptive statistics show higher mean scores in targeted skills following the classroom activities. Although they are exploratory, these findings suggest the potential benefit of incorporating such activities into early childhood classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new test, the ASL Receptive Skills Test (ALS-RST), adapted from the BSL Receptive Skills Test (BSL-RST), was administered to 160 deaf children, ages 3-5, as part of the Early Education Longitudinal Study conducted by the Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning. An analysis of the test's psychometric properties was conducted. The results support the use of the ASL-RST for measuring ASL grammatical knowledge for developing signers at this young age level. The overall reliability of the test across all age groups was .96. An ANOVA revealed significant differences among sample age groups, as well as significant differences among groups of children differentiated by whether their families reported regularly using sign in the home. An analysis of items grouped by the grammatical feature that determined the structure of the ASL-RST showed systematic gains by age and systematic differentiation by the degree of grammatical complexity represented by the items. These grammatical differences in score performance are discussed from a developmental perspective in light of the current research literature on ASL acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sign INSTITUTE is the source of a family of ASL signs that are used to refer to residential schools for deaf children and to other institutions. The members of the INSTITUTE sign family-although initialized-are well-established within the Deaf community and, importantly, are used to refer to highly-valued aspects of Deaf culture. This is true despite the fact that initialized signs are sometimes rejected within the Deaf community. We examine the etymology of the sign INSTITUTE and suggest two plausible hypotheses for its origin. In analyzing the etymology of the sign INSTITUTE and its derivatives, we consider historical changes in how state residential schools for deaf children were named in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pressing concern in the education of deaf children is their lack of academic success as measured by literacy rates. Most deaf children finish high school reading below a fourth-grade level. Educational television programs have successfully fostered preschool hearing children's emergent literacy skills. As for preschool deaf children, however, there has been only limited research on whether this medium can be effective. This study uses descriptive analyses to determine the type and frequency of literacy behaviors that preschool deaf children engage in while viewing an educational video in American Sign Language. Children were videotaped during three such sessions, and the videos were coded for literacy-related engagement behaviors. The results of this study indicate that preschool deaf children engaged in a variety of such behaviors regardless of age and ASL exposure and that these behaviors increased after multiple video viewings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in research on Estonian Sign Language, or eesti viipekeel (EVK), has been increasing. Studies have been conducted on different aspects of EVK, such as ways of expressing time (Trükmann 2006) and color terms (Hollman and Sutrop 2007, Hollman 2008). Moreover, EVK has lately received more attention in legislation. The language obtained an official status in 2007, which the Deaf community greatly appreciated. Therefore, an overview of the Estonian Deaf community and EVK should be given in order to identify the areas that have been studied and those that have not received much attention. The main aspects of the Deaf community covered in this article are as follows: history, members, and Deaf associations. The distinguishing features of the language used by the Deaf community are also described, and Deaf children's educational options in Estonia are explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how deaf children develop literacy skills, and the role played by sign language in the reconstruction of written language of deaf children. It is stated that deaf children are linguistically and communicatively competent in their own natural sign language, and written language is a second language for them. It is mentioned that in Argentina, deaf children understand sign language when they join a deaf public school. At a school in Mendoza, Argentina, the constructivist approach was used to teach deaf children who had little reading and writing experience. The students started with simple sentences, and they learned how to write long texts within a year. They were given instruction in Argentine Sign Language (LSA).

The establishment of deaf education in the United States has traditionally been seen as the heroic act of one inspired hearing man, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. As Paddy Ladd writes in Understanding Deaf Culture, this is the "Grand Narrative,' where Deaf communities are constructed solely as the individual end product of a lineage of distinguished hearing educators" (2003, 88). More recently, with the establishment of Deaf studies as an academic discipline, credit is increasingly given to Laurent Clerc, the deaf Frenchman from whom T. H. Gallaudet learned to sign and who came to America with Clerc to help establish the nation's first school for deaf children in Hartford, Connecticut. This article argues that these two men would never have been called on to play the roles they did without the earlier and necessary contributions of Lydia Huntley Sigourney. Before Gallaudet and Clerc enrolled their first pupil, Alice Cogswell, in 1817, Lydia Huntley, under the patronage of the wealthy Daniel Wadsworth and with the support of both of Alice's parents, had taught the little deaf girl to read and write English. The Cogswells, the Wadsworths, and the Wadsworths' protégée, Lydia Huntley, formed a group of what Ladd terms "laypeople," people related by blood, friendship, and community who, though they lacked any sort of professional training, nevertheless came together and rolled up their sleeves to enable Alice's education. This article investigates Lydia Huntley Sigourney's role in the founding of American deaf education, her lifelong contacts with the deaf school and its pupils after her own retirement from teaching, and her later erasure from Deaf history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has a dual purpose. Its first purpose is to describe in some detail Sign in Education, a pilot program in the United Kingdom that integrated Deaf children and hearing children in a hearing classroom with a culturally Deaf teacher who taught the national curriculum to the pupils, both Deaf and hearing, in British Sign Language (BSL) for one afternoon a week throughout the fourteen-month-long project. Its second purpose is to explore and consider the value and advantage to the Deaf community, as well as the majority culture, of adopting a version of such a program in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]