About ASL
American Sign Language
Why does ASL become a first language for many deaf people?
Parents are often the source of a child's early acquisition of language. A deaf child who is born to deaf parents who already use ASL will begin to acquire ASL as naturally as a hearing child picks up spoken language from hearing parents. However, language is acquired differently by a deaf child with hearing parents who have no prior experience with ASL. Some hearing parents choose to introduce sign language to their deaf children. Hearing parents who choose to learn sign language often learn it along with their child. Nine out of every ten children who are born deaf are born to parents who hear. Other communication models, based in spoken English, exist apart from ASL, including oral, auditory-verbal, and cued speech. As with any language, interaction with other children and adults is also a significant factor in acquisition.
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Why emphasize early language learning?
Parents should introduce deaf children to language as early as possible. The earlier any child is exposed to and begins to acquire language, the better that child's communication skills will become. Research suggests that the first six months are the most crucial to a child's development of language skills. All newborns should be screened for deafness or hearing loss before they leave the hospital or within the first month of life. Very early discovery of a child's hearing loss or deafness provides parents with an opportunity to learn about communication options. Parents can then start their child's language learning process during this important stage of development.
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What does recent research say about ASL and other sign languages?
Some studies focus on the age of ASL acquisition. Age is a critical issue for people who acquire ASL, whether it is a first or second language. For a person to become fully competent in any language, exposure must begin as early as possible, preferably before school age. Other studies compare the skills of native signers and non-native signers to determine differences in language processing ability. Native signers of ASL consistently display more accomplished sign language ability than non-native signers, again emphasizing the importance of early exposure and acquisition.
Other studies focus on different ASL processing skills. Users of ASL have shown ability to process visual mental images differently than hearing users of English. Though English speakers possess the skills needed to process visual imagery, ASL users demonstrate faster processing ability--suggesting that sign language enhances certain processing functions of the human brain.
About SEE
Signing Exact English: Information from Answers.com
Advantages
SEE sign shows fully the use of articles and prepositions to deaf children who often have difficulty learning the correct usage of these parts of the English language.
SEE is easy for English speaking parents and teachers of deaf children to master quickly.
Disadvantages
SEE is much slower than natural speech or ASL unless it abandons its stricture to be faithful to spoken English and becomes more ASL-like.
SEE has no community of adult users and is not part of a flourishing culture as is the case for both English and ASL
SEE cannot faithfully show every aspect of spoken English
Educational controversy
As with almost every aspect of the education of deaf children, the use of SEE is mired in controversy concerning its efficacy and utility. In a way, it is a slight variation of the oralist vs. manualist controversy which has pitted those that have supported the use of sign language against those that believed in lipreading and speech therapy as the best way to educate deaf children. This debate has raged for two centuries.
Supporters of ASL or the manualists claim that SEE and its cohort system, Cued Speech, robs children of belonging to a culture that they can fully participate in, is hard for deaf children to master and does not result in those children being competent with English. Further, since the introduction of the Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Epee's methodical signs in the 1760s and their continuance by his successor, the Abbe Roch-Ambroise Sicard, scholars in deaf education have continually said that such systems are actually accommodations for the hearing teachers who have not learned the natural language of the deaf because of the great difficulty they encountered in doing so. Indeed, while deaf children are instructed using SEE so as to learn English, they receive no instruction in ASL whatsoever and must acquire it from other students and deaf adults who are present in the educational environment. Still further, they claim its use is a disrespectful attempt to change deaf children into hearing ones as much as is possible with great harm to the intellectual and emotional development of the children involved. It is often cited as a great irony that when hearing people use their mastery of their native language as a bridge to learning a second language, the world's universal embrace of applying this method of language acquisition is considered fundamental to all mankind with the exception of the deaf, whose natural language is the language of signs. Deaf people see themselves being subjected to the reverse of this long-accepted rule of language acquisition.
Tremendous confusion is cited by the deaf also since, while in the process of acquiring SEE, the teacher often reverts to explaining the system in Signed English which permits the teacher to simultaneously speak while using manual communication. Since Signed English, itself, is often unintelligible to the deaf, they find themselves gathering after classroom instruction to work out not only the lessons in SEE, but also what the teacher was saying in Signed English, and the children themselves work out both problems using ASL. The extraordinary tedium in learning SEE, translated in part by Signed English, and finally translated again into ASL makes for a perplexing burden on young deaf children that is not placed on hearing children. It accounts for very low rates of literacy among the deaf and, according to surveys of hearing teachers of the deaf, a high level of job dissatisfaction.
Finally, deaf people explain that SEE itself has added to a tremendous corruption or confusion of ASL. Casual acquisition of a signed language by hearing people is common. These casual learners are often taught the SEE equivalent of an ASL sign, such as the initialized "he" signed in SEE from the forehead using the "H" handshape as opposed to the ASL sign "he" made by pointing the index finger at a person or at a designed point in space. Casual learners generalize upon such SEE signs to think that personal pronouns are initialized and that they belong to the vocabulary of ASL when, in fact, they do not. Since deaf people are most often in the role of accommodating hearing people with whom they are communicating, they accommodate these errors even when they recognize them as errors and thus doing, reinforce the misunderstanding about the nature of signs. Added to this is the problem that, since ASL is almost never an academic subject in the education of the deaf, the deaf themselves often cannot explain the errors to hearing people and by this omission permit errors in signing to persist.
Supporters of SEE claim that it helps children to integrate into the wider culture and is an important part of becoming competent with English which is the key to success in the professional world as well as being integral in a person's ability to function in other aspects of the dominant culture which surrounds them.
SEE is easy for English speaking parents and teachers of deaf children to master quickly.
Even though SEE is not considered a language at many schools it is taught as a first language. Are deaf students really learning a language? Students first develop
BICS but without a first language many deaf students are not able to develop the language needed to function in society and then develop CALP.
My own words
See the italics...that's why I believe strongly in exposing language not visual codes of a language to deaf children during their formative years of language development.
I had been exposed to ASL since learning sign and I became fluent in it. Then whenver someone uses SEE, I have trouble understanding it even though my first and only language growing up was spoken English..I cannot understand SEE because in my mind, I have two language processing centers which are English and ASL so whenever I am conversing using sign, the ASL center of my brain is used so SEE becomes confusing to me and very hard. Also, since it is slower and more tedious, my eyes end up hurting and just like with lip reading. The processing of the information becomes unnatural and I have to work hard at trying to understand what the person is saying in SEE. Yes, I understand it but it takes work rather as opposed to ASL, it is more natural.
The problem with SEE in small children is they need to have a strong L1 first ..if they dont, many of the signs dont have meanings for the children like "and" "to" and the children lose interest. Believe me, I tried to teach SEE when teaching reading and writing to my 1st graders but most of the time I have to revert back to ASL to keep their attention on me. The older kids are taught in SEE for reading and writing and they do better because they understand the purpose for it as opposed to young children who have short attention spans.
I think SEE should only be used when teaching reading and writing not for language development.
Anyways...studies have shown that deaf children from deaf families acquire competent literacy skills so if ASL was messing up the grammar of English, then these deaf children from deaf families wouldnt have good reading and writing skills. It is all because they developed CALP.
Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency
CALP refers to formal academic learning. This includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing about subject area content material. This level of language learning is essential for students to succeed in school. Students need time and support to become proficient in academic areas. This usually takes from five to seven years. Recent research (Thomas & Collier, 1995) has shown that if a child has no prior schooling or has no support in native language development, it may take seven to ten years for ELLs to catch up to their peers.
Academic language acquisition isn't just the understanding of content area vocabulary. It includes skills such as comparing, classifying, synthesizing, evaluating, and inferring. Academic language tasks are context reduced. Information is read from a textbook or presented by the teacher. As a student gets older the context of academic tasks becomes more and more reduced.
The language also becomes more cognitively demanding. New ideas, concepts and language are presented to the students at the same time.
Jim Cummins also advances the theory that there is a common underlying proficiency (CUP) between two languages. Skills, ideas and concepts students learn in their first language will be transferred to the second language.[/B]
