A La Guardia Community College (New York) course in developmental writing for deaf students features small class size and teachers fluent in American Sign Language. Teaching practices include reading of model essays on topics of interest to deaf students, peer feedback on the first two drafts of writing assignments, and student "reading…

The English Language Institute at Gallaudet University (District of Columbia) prepares foreign deaf students to attend college in the United States through a year-long intensive literacy program in American English and immersion in American Sign Language and deaf culture. The Institute's educational philosophies and teaching strategies focus on…

Investigates how deaf children with deaf parents learn to get attention as a speaker in order to participate in an American Sign Language conversation. Findings reveal that one child's attempts at getting attention demonstrates that while she could perform many culturally appropriate attention-getting behaviors, she was still developing awareness…

Discusses two experiments investigating non-antecedent suppression in American Sign Language (ASL). Findings indicate that spoken and signed languages use the same processing mechanisms in resolving co-reference relations. Results also indicate that within the probe recognition paradigm, the spatial indexing of ASL pronouns is similar to gender…

This article describes "Hands On," a research project employing interactive computer/videodisc technology to teach English to deaf children with American Sign Language (ASL) skills. Elementary school students can read a story in printed English text, watch an ASL-signed version of the story, access a list of vocabulary words, or caption a story…

Investigates the administration and interpretation of deaf educational policy at a regular education campus. There was a breakdown in translation of policy and a lack of articulation between the County and the District, as well as confusion regarding language use in the classroom and a lack of knowledge concerning the bilingual education of the…

Examines a number of ways in which the process of natural acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) from competent adult and child users of the language might directly enhance the learning of English. The natural acquisition of ASL, contact signing, and fingerspelling may enhance English language literacy. (45 references) (MDM)

Deaf and hearing children at two grade levels (fourth and eighth) provided written texts for an analysis of text structure and quality. Deaf writers used as many cohesive devices as hearing writers but used fewer different lexical terms per device. The deaf children's texts are discussed in terms of possible language transference. (66 references)…

The written English vocabulary of 72 deaf elementary school students of various proficiency levels in American Sign Language (ASL) was compared with the performance of 60 hearing English-as-a-second-language (ESL) speakers and 61 hearing monolingual speakers of English, all of similar age. Students were asked to retell "The Tortoise and the Hare"…

The CC School project, which included 18 elementary students with deafness enrolled in the TRIPOD program within the Burbank (California) Public Schools, applied a personal video captioning technology in a workstation setting to a weekly writing experience that involved translating short American Sign Language video stories into written English…

This collection of original papers draws upon work in linguistics, psychology, and education to highlight the relationship between language acquisition in deaf and hearing populations. The book's 11 chapters are divided into 2 sections, Theoretical Issues and Research Reports. Titles and authors are as follows: "Language Varieties in the Deaf…

A study examined aspects of the acquisition of spatialized morphology and syntax in American Sign Language (ASL) learned natively by deaf children of deaf parents. Children aged 2 to 8 were shown story books to elicit narratives, and the resulting use of verbs contained morphological forms not appearing in adult grammar. Analysis of the creative…

Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications of research are provided in this status report covering the period of April 1 through June 30, 1982. The 13 reports deal with the following topics: (1) the functional significance of physiological tremor, (2) differences between experienced…

Reports on the continuing work in the development of a computerized writing system for American Sign Language (ASL) called Signfont. Inventories for handshapes and nonmanual markers are presented and discussed extensively. A proposed inventory of phonetic handshapes in ASL are appended. (Author/LMO)

This digest presents information on bilingual-bicultural education for children who are deaf or hard of hearing. The premise of bilingual-bicultural education is that all children who are deaf or hard of hearing should develop communicative competency and that they need to be bilingual in order to function successfully in the family, school, and…