You hit the nail on the head about the spoken language and the written language. Many Americans would learn French from a textbook, but, when they went to France and tried to make a conversation in French with native French speakers, they would be sneered at by French people! “What tongue are you speaking? the French would ask an American! Daddy told me that the best way for a person to learn a foreign language would be to reside with different families in different regions of a country for three years. French from a textbook is entirely different from street French!

Now to Bilingualism — ASL and English:
ASL is a signed language equivalent of Spoken English. Meaning? ASL users are bilingual, using sign language and read and write in English. That is something that the myopic AGBell does not see under his nose.

I want to response to C’s comment on formal and informal English. ASL has formal and informal. In formal format, ASL has to follow discourse such as starting with what topic you’re talking about then explain the whole body then ends with topic that you mentioned. As for informal, there is no need to use discourse. It depends on where you are. if you are talking to a friend then it is an informal ASL. if you are presenting in a meeting then you need to use discourses ASL. Technically, English and ASL has the similar way of using formal and informal of expressing the thought

This is a serious issue with Deaf technicans and professionals in working with hearing peers. Besides being a data flow issue, it is also an issue of leaving things simply understood and not spoken, assuming that the other person has been discussing the topic for many months in the same truncated language.

This problem has several faces: one is that sign has the best data flow for visually dependent people, next to reading. Another is that for hearing dependent people, data flow in speech has a different characteristic than in sign language and different from the written word; the differences need to be explored and described further.

EXCERPT:

Tom Harbison, of the Wisconsin School for the Deaf [WSD], said that national studies that came out in the late 1980s showed that “total communication” had failed the majority of deaf children. Deaf children taught with the technique were reading at an average second-grade level when they graduated from high school. While WSD was having better success, it decided in 1991 to shift to teaching ASL as its students’ first language.

The Wisconsin school, the Indiana School for the Deaf and about a half dozen others are among the leaders in state schools who are switching to what is called the Bi-Bi curriculum, in which students are taught ASL first, then written English as their second language. (Bi-Bi refers to a bilingual, bicultural approach.)

Harbison, School Superintendent Alex Slappey and a group of WSD parents and teachers recently visited the Learning Center in Massachusetts, which pioneered the Bi-Bi approach and which is having excellent success, Harbison said.

That would be called speaking ‘literary English’. Yeah, I heard of that expression, yes. However, that does NOT diminish the fact that spoken and written English are two different languages. Also, when professionals speak literary English, they still add pitch, tone, etc as they speak.

Some people do speak as they write and some don’t..probably more so in the latter.

When you throw in a newspaper article or a paper for your thesis or term paper, then, yeah, it’s not gonna be the same as spoken English. Makes sense?

That’s just my observation based on my verbal and email communication on a personal level with my hearing friends.