Bilingual and ESL Approaches To Deaf Education

Bilingual and ESL Approaches To Deaf Education

Introduction

Deaf students are often neglected in professional and academic field of bilingual education. Practice and policy, however, bilingual education is not limited to immigrant students whose families speak a minority language or for students who are learning a new language and the language of the majority. There are plenty of bilingual education programs for the deaf, and the number of such programs is growing steadily worldwide. Languages in the bilingual education program to include the deaf in sign language, rather than sign language (language of the majority hearing community). For example, the two languages are taught in school for the Deaf in Stockholm, Sweden, and Swedish sign language. In another school in Fremont, Calif., is American Sign Language and English (Bringer, 1993, 193-217).

Modal language for deaf students is different from other bilingual students. Sign language is the language of the manual / visual rather than voice and acoustic communication. Like any spoken language, each language has its own sign of phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic and regulations. If we can bypass mode the moment, it is clear that bilingual programs for deaf people, as well as other bilingual programs. Deaf students who use sign language can be regarded as members of minority languages, most of them use sign language as the primary method of communication, however, research and development of skills in most (not sign) language at school. This article describes some of the problems and challenges in the field of Deaf bilingual education.

Although the idea of bilingual education is not new in the history of education of deaf students, has been in the mid-seventies when he finally emerged in Europe the first bilingual experiences that were put into practice in schools. Already in 1980 the Swedish National Curriculum acknowledged the Swedish Sign Language as the language of access to the school curriculum, also began to study as an independent curricular content. Years later, after a required evaluation of the whole experience, which showed markedly positive results, and knowledge accumulated in this period, it was decided to increase the initially proposed objectives in the education of Deaf students, conducted in 1995 a curriculum reform in National, which was, in short, the fact that deaf students in Sweden not only be bilingual in sign language and Swedish at the end of compulsory education schools, but also must meet the same academic standards their peers listeners (Albertan, 2000, 123-125).

In 1982 he also started bilingual experiences in Denmark, one of whose most recent successes was the legislative reform, in 1991 - by the Ministry of Education in this country, why the Danish Sign Language is included in its educational system curricular content, i.e. as a separate subject from the pre-school. (It is interesting that the Danish Deaf children overcome the same tests of English those children listeners).

At present, bilingual experiences have spread throughout the world, from countries geographically closest, as may be Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and the United ...