Is it really so bad to know SEE (Sign Exact English?)

That's what I am doing...teaching English through ASL...it was done over a hundred years ago and it worked. It is working now.

The problem lies with deaf children not having access to language at home when their families don't learn ASL.
Yes, sad.

In previous decades, when most deaf children went to residential schools, their education was reinforced outside of classroom time by classmates and staff members who signed with them, shared experiences with them, and helped each other with homework and studying.
 
There are people younger and older than me that uses SEE. I don't see what the beef is here. A lot of people thinks that I uses SEE more than ASL. Ok fine. Carry on.
 
Questions to Deaf signers:

Do you think by some using SEE and some using ASL that brings Deaf people together or separates them from each other, or is it a neutral influence?

Can SEE users and ASL users communicate comfortably and easily with each other?

If an interpreter is using ASL, and you use SEE, is that a problem? (Suppose it is a group situation, and the majority of the Deaf in the group are ASL users, so they got an ASL terp for the event).

(No, I'm not doing homework or writing a paper on this topic. :lol: )
 
From my observation - ASL people usually pick or mocking on SEE people. Do they feel comfortably communicate with each other? Not 100%. Most of the time they don't really understand each other very well.

I can sign ASL, but most of the time I don't really understand what they said when they're full-on expression ASL.
 
Questions to Deaf signers:

Do you think by some using SEE and some using ASL that brings Deaf people together or separates them from each other, or is it a neutral influence?

Can SEE users and ASL users communicate comfortably and easily with each other?

If an interpreter is using ASL, and you use SEE, is that a problem? (Suppose it is a group situation, and the majority of the Deaf in the group are ASL users, so they got an ASL terp for the event).

(No, I'm not doing homework or writing a paper on this topic. :lol: )

CHEATING!!! JUST KIDDING.

Some people do have patience for SEE users like me. I have couple of SEE users friends. From my understanding that they grew up oral and then learn sign language so they were stuck with SEE but they didn't use " ed, ing, be etc". They both are in 50's as they learned SEE 30 yrs ago. So they happen to be cool people. She admits that she could not understand SEE interpreter or ASL interpreter at all.
 
Questions to Deaf signers:

Do you think by some using SEE and some using ASL that brings Deaf people together or separates them from each other, or is it a neutral influence?

Can SEE users and ASL users communicate comfortably and easily with each other?

If an interpreter is using ASL, and you use SEE, is that a problem? (Suppose it is a group situation, and the majority of the Deaf in the group are ASL users, so they got an ASL terp for the event).

(No, I'm not doing homework or writing a paper on this topic. :lol: )



I honestly have a hard time understanding SEE although I grew up orally with English as my only language. When I first learned sign language, it was ASL so I learned that and then met some SEE users and just could not really understand them well because my brain is being forced to work between both languages unnaturally.

Like I said, English evolved naturally through the spoken form and ASL evolved naturally through the signed form.

English in the signed form is not natural and neither is ASL in the spoken form.

If I met a SEE user, I will be willing to work around the difference in the signing if that person is willing to work around it as well. No problems with that.
 
CHEATING!!! JUST KIDDING.

Some people do have patience for SEE users like me. I have couple of SEE users friends. From my understanding that they grew up oral and then learn sign language so they were stuck with SEE but they didn't use " ed, ing, be etc". They both are in 50's as they learned SEE 30 yrs ago. So they happen to be cool people. She admits that she could not understand SEE interpreter or ASL interpreter at all.
She couldn't understand the SEE interpreting either?
 
I honestly have a hard time understanding SEE although I grew up orally with English as my only language. When I first learned sign language, it was ASL so I learned that and then met some SEE users and just could not really understand them well because my brain is being forced to work between both languages unnaturally.

Like I said, English evolved naturally through the spoken form and ASL evolved naturally through the signed form.

English in the signed form is not natural and neither is ASL in the spoken form.

If I met a SEE user, I will be willing to work around the difference in the signing if that person is willing to work around it as well. No problems with that.
What about PSE between SEE and ASL users? Does that work for you?
 
What about PSE between SEE and ASL users? Does that work for you?

That is what I meant...the SEE user and myself working around the signing differences hence using PSE. :)

I should have said that in the first place...didnt think. lol
 
That is what I meant...the SEE user and myself working around the signing differences hence using PSE. :)

I should have said that in the first place...didnt think. lol
Got it! :giggle:
 

I can understand PSE and ASL. Regarding SEE, my mind automatically creates pictures when I see someone signing so I have to constantly work hard to create words (English) to understand a SEE signer.

For deaf children, that is not the way to go in order for them to acquire a language. It can be an useful tool when teaching English with some students (if they have a strong first language). If they dont...they will be more confused. I have seen evidence of that in the last 15 years personally.
 
From my observation - ASL people usually pick or mocking on SEE people. Do they feel comfortably communicate with each other? Not 100%. Most of the time they don't really understand each other very well.

I can sign ASL, but most of the time I don't really understand what they said when they're full-on expression ASL.
I've been made fun of or mocked by people who think SEE is stupid. I've actually had some deaf people say that as a person who signs SEE, I won't get anywhere in life. My response to them? "How many college degrees do you have?" They immediately shut up and walk away.
 
I reading. I notice

The Importance of Morphemic Awareness to Reading Achievement and the Potential of Signing Morphemes to Supporting Reading Development

exactly

Rationale for and Comparison of SEE to Other Systems

Prior to the early 1970s, educational programs for children with a hearing loss were “oral-only” (i.e., adults did not sign when speaking to students with hearing loss; Stedt & Moores, 1990) and teachers of the deaf (TODs) did not sign at school. About that time, sign slowly seeped into use as an educational tool in “total communication” classrooms. ASL was beginning to be offered at the college level for credit, and the concept of “educational interpreter” had not been developed as yet. In most programs, the sign used was not specifically delineated as a particular language or system as ASL had only recently been recognized as a language and forms of manually coded English had just been invented (Gustason, 1990).

As an outgrowth of “the continuing concern about low levels of literacy and other academic skills attained by most deaf students” and “an attempt to teach deaf children the language that would be used in schools” (Marschark, Schick, & Spencer, 2006, p. 9), manually coded invented sign systems were developed. SEE (Gustason et al., 1973), the sign system of focus in this paper, is one such system. The first manual English system, Seeing Essential English or SEE 1 (referred to today as Morphemic Sign Systems or MSS) was designed by David Anthony, a deaf teacher, with input from a team of deaf educators and the parents of deaf children (Gustason, 1990). The other members of the team viewed SEE 1 (MSS) as inadequate. As a result, Gerilee Gustason, a deaf woman and educator, and other members of the original SEE 1 (MSS) team developed Signing Exact English (Gustason et al., 1973), initially referred to as SEE 2, but now simply as SEE. Gustason (1990) delineated the rationale for the invention of SEE as not only due to dissatisfaction with the educational achievement of children with a hearing loss and a desire to use the English language in education but also due to the increasing knowledge of English language development of hearing children and research as to the inability of speech reading to access the grammar of spoken English. At the time of the creation of SEE, research documented that deaf children acquired a smaller vocabulary than their hearing peers. In addition, deaf students’ understanding of the morphological and syntactical rules of English was weak when compared to the understanding and clear pattern of development of their hearing peers. Gustason explained that “many word endings are not visible (e.g., interest, interesting, interests, and interested are nearly impossible to distinguish) and … some involve hard-to-hear sounds” (p. 109). This is an issue that cannot be resolved through speech reading because according to the research she reviewed, only 5% of what was said through speech reading was understood by “otherwise capable deaf children” (p. 109). To address the need to visually represent words fully and accurately, SEE was designed to correspond with the number of morphemes of English (Luetke-Stahlman, 1998). Signs are provided for root words and affix markers (e.g., re-, un-, -ing, -ity, -ness). Different signs exist for different words, so that it is possible to sign electric, electrical, electrician, electricity, and nonelectrical. Both the root word and all affixes are made visually obvious. The hope for this system was that signing English would increase the language, reading, and writing abilities of children who were deaf or hard of hearing (Luetke-Stahlman, 1990). The same author expanded on this concept in the forward of the revised SEE dictionary (Gustason & Zawolkow, 1993) explaining that SEE 2 visually displays figurative, authentic, exact English, which Pidgin Signed English (PSE) cannot.

The basic similarities and differences between SEE and other invented sign systems and ASL are outlined in Table 1. MSS, SEE, and the third manually coded system, Signed English (SE) (Bornstein, 1974, 1990), are both similar and dissimilar in ways that warrant clarification. Users of all three systems speak while they sign. They also represent English semantics and syntax via signs but to different degrees. MSS users attempt to sign almost every syllable of every word that they say. For example, a word such as motorcycle has four sign parts in MSS. Users of the SE system can sign some of the morphology of English, but to a limited degree, because SE represents only 14 signed morphological markers. For example, to say and sign the word unworkable, the user is constrained in SE and can only sign “not work” because SE does not have a sign for the morpheme un. In contrast, users of SEE can choose among 94 morphological markers to make English morphology visual to a deaf student. Because SEE users base the signed component of their utterances on the number of morphemes of a word, an SEE user would manually use three signs for unworkable, one for each morpheme: un, work, and able. As Schick and Moeller (1992) explained, SEE “attempts to represent English literally, and it purports to follow a strict criterion of one sign for one English free morpheme or ‘word’” (pp. 318–319). They went on to note that SEE
follows English semantics and does not borrow from ASL semantics, unlike some other MCE [manually-coded English] systems. For example, the English word run would appear as the same sign in the following phrases even through a different sign would be used in ASL for each one: “a home run”; “a runny nose”; “run for office”; and “a run on the ban” (p. 319).
View this table:
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Table 1

Basic similarities and differences between Signed Exact English (SEE), other created sign systems, and American Sign Language (ASL)


Both MSS and SEE are based on a “two out of three” rule: If a word is spelled with the same letters and sounds the same, it is signed in the same way, even if the meaning of the two words differs. Thus, the word run is signed consistently in SEE no matter the meaning. SEE uses the manual features common to all sign languages and systems as was first explained by the authors in the first edition of the SEE dictionary (Gustasonet al., 1973). The “two out of three” rule is not utilized in SE or PSE. Instead, when English words have different meanings, they are usually signed in different ways. For more detailed information as to the commonalities and differences of signed language and systems, see Stewart and Luetke-Stahlman (1998).
 
:wave:
I've been made fun of or mocked by people who think SEE is stupid. I've actually had some deaf people say that as a person who signs SEE, I won't get anywhere in life. My response to them? "How many college degrees do you have?" They immediately shut up and walk away.

I have personally experienced backlash (really only on this forum) for choosing to have English/SEE as my child's first and natural language...

No amount of backlash will diminish the positive impact SEE has had on his language development. He has pretty much always been on target or advanced with his language abilities, and his most recent statewide testing he scored in the Advanced range (the highest category) for English and Language Arts.

So I can safely say that for my child, and our goals for him (which included the ability to effectively communicate and for him to be proficient in English) were met through the use of Signing Exact English.

Even knowing how effective SEE can be for young DHH children, I would still not say that another approach is wrong or ineffective. Everyone is an individual.
 
She couldn't understand the SEE interpreting either?

Right. She grrew up oral and until she learned how to sign in see when she was early 30's but she would not comprehend what SEE interpreter or ASL interpreter says.

She said that I am good at signing in a mixed ASL at most with some of SEE in a slow motion that she understands me better. I even have to fingerspell for her. She said that she learns a lot from me about everything. She's capable of doing other things but she misses a lot of words that she didn't realize the words that applies to when she didnt know what to use the term. It shows me that she does it very well at receiving ASL than SEE. Shel explained in the first post that applied to her as well.
 
To thos who advocate for SEE and all that...


Do you advocate for changing spoken English to follow the grammar rules of ASL (spoken ASL)?
 
:wave:

I have personally experienced backlash (really only on this forum) for choosing to have English/SEE as my child's first and natural language...

No amount of backlash will diminish the positive impact SEE has had on his language development. He has pretty much always been on target or advanced with his language abilities, and his most recent statewide testing he scored in the Advanced range (the highest category) for English and Language Arts.

So I can safely say that for my child, and our goals for him (which included the ability to effectively communicate and for him to be proficient in English) were met through the use of Signing Exact English.

Even knowing how effective SEE can be for young DHH children, I would still not say that another approach is wrong or ineffective. Everyone is an individual.



A backlash for using it with your child? Hmmm...maybe with some posters BUT..

I remember it was for a different reason. Something to do with creating a thread announcing that it is a language? Correct?

Pls do not try to lie or omit important reasons and create pity on yourself. You demeaned many deaf posters so as a result, you got a backlash.
 
A backlash for using it with your child? Hmmm...maybe with some posters BUT..

I remember it was for a different reason. Something to do with creating a thread announcing that it is a language? Correct?

Oh Shel, you know better than that. You knew what I meant which was clarified many times... That SEE is another mode of English. I most certainly was on the receiving end of backlash because I used SEE with him. Let's not get it twisted.
Pls do not try to lie or omit important reasons and create pity on yourself. You demeaned many deaf posters so as a result, you got a backlash.

At no time have I lied on this forum- not once. No pity party here. That certainly can't be said for everyone on this forum. Simply stating the facts.
 
ASL is a real, distinct language.

SEE is similar to shouting; it enables someone to use English in a situation where regular speech might fail to get the message across.
 
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