other data obtained in the survey suggest two possible forms of BiBi education.
As with any type of research, survey research has its limitations, including the forced response nature of questions, the inability to determine how respondents interpreted questions, the inability to determine respondents’ care in filling out the survey, and the degree of correspondence between survey data and information that would be gained from direct observation. In addition, when responses are summarized only as percentages, individual differences between and among programs become obscured. As King and Quigley (1985) note, however, survey research constitutes a base upon which more comprehensive institutional research involving additional research methods can be built (p. 75).
Within the limitations of survey methods, some important insights have been gained from the survey reported here about the number of day and residential schools in the United States that describe themselves as BiBi and characteristics of those programs related to what influenced them to become BiBi programs, when they began to describe themselves as BiBi, and how they implemented their program. Other program characteristics related to language and communication, curriculum, and program evaluation were also gleaned. Clearly, more research with different methods, including direct observation, are needed to corroborate the findings of this study. Further, given that between 36% and 40% of deaf students in residential and day schools for deaf students are in programs that identify themselves as BiBi programs, research is needed to determine how teacher preparation programs are preparing future BiBi teachers. Among the questions to be addressed by teacher preparation programs are questions related to (1) knowledge that current teacher educators have about BiBi programs in the United States, including knowledge of the professional literature related to theory and research linked to BiBi programs; (2) differentiation of coursework in current teacher preparation programs for future teachers who plan to work in residential or day schools versus mainstreamed programs; (3) ASL standards for students preparing to work in BiBi programs; and (4) how the following topics are addressed in teacher preparation programs: history of bilingual education in general education, history of BiBi education (including factors promoting the growth of BiBi education), research and theory related to BiBi education, research and theory related to the different systems for communicating English to deaf students (e.g., oral-aural methods, MCE systems, fingerspelling, and Cued Speech), the structure of ASL and English, the role of conversational forms of the written language in the development of reading abilities, curricular modifications in reading and content areas in BiBi programs, multiculturalism, assessment, and evaluation. There is little research related to the questions posed here. Answers to these questions are needed to determine whether teacher preparation programs are preparing personnel needed for current and future BiBi programs for deaf children and youth in the United States.
Notes
1. In this article, “deaf students” refers to both deaf and hardofhearing students.
2. Among the major MCE systems developed were Seeing Essential English (Anthony, 1971); Signed English (Bornstein, Saulnier, & Hamilton, 1973–1984); Signing Exact English (Gustason, Pfetzing, & Zawolkow, 1972); and Visual Linguistics of English (Wampler, 1974).
3. See Leybaert and Charlier (1996), however, for research support for the view that deaf children exposed to Cued Speech at home and at school develop English abilities comparable to
those of hearing peers.
4. See Marschark (1993, pp. 219–220), however, for the view that if academic achievement of deaf children of deaf parents is superior to that of deaf children of hearing parents, the existing research does not establish it. 5. See Marschark (1993, pp. 155–159 ), however, for methodological limitations of studies of existing spatial and temporal memory of deaf students.
6. Surveys were also sent to 213 public day class programs for deaf students that were listed in the 1998 Directory of the AAD that had at least 30 students and had not checked “oral-aural” as their primary mode of communication. Only 11% (n = 23) of those programs responded to the survey, with 13% (n = 3) of the 23 responding yes to the question asking whether they considered themselves to be a BiBi program. Responses from these three programs, however, suggested that they were not BiBi programs, and follow-up phone calls affirmed that they were not BiBi. For example, one large public school system indicated they had a single teacher “who was using BiBi methods,” and a second large public school system indicated that they had confused BiBi education with bilingual education used with hearing children.
7. Programs that identified themselves as BiBi programs were randomly assigned numbers between 1 and 19 to preserve confidentiality of responses. Data reported here for individual programs
are by program number.
8. It should not be interpreted that 11 BiBi programs have been created since 1994 when Strong reported his findings about BiBi programs. Many of the programs participating in the current
survey indicate they were created before 1995.
9. See Mason (1997) for a response to Mayer and Wells, Mayer and Wells (1997) for a response to Mason.
