Why many deaf schools could not have Bilingual program?
We all know that bilingual program (ASL/English) is very important for every deaf child in America but why couldn’t we have the implementation of bilingual program established just yet?
The main reason why many of the superintendents, etc of the schools that teaches deaf children would not do it is because they do not have enough staffs, teachers, etc that know ASL,… including most of the superintendents themselves.
In order for a bilingual program to work is that the teachers need to learn/know ASL instead of their present skills in rudimentary sign language that typically have very low data flow rate of education output which is why deaf children are being deprived in getting normal education. Many of those present teachers do not want to learn ASL for the sake of deaf children’s desire to learn.
In analogy sense,
In public schools across America having foreigner teachers speaking in broken English with mispronunciations that would put a lot of strain on hearing students trying to learn. Would you think their parents would have objections? You bet! And surely would have rectification done by political action.
This is exactly what is going on with majority of the schools that teaches deaf children, many teachers usually mispronounce signs and have “broken” visual sign language (not using ASL) and also use oral speech/lipread that causes misunderstandings about half of the time and causes teachers to get fed up repeating the same thing all the time.
So now we can see that we really do have a problem. What should we do about it? You know that we just can’t eliminate those ‘inefficient†teachers… we could have lawsuits all over the country!
Should we have a national goal by NAD in getting deaf teachers for the deaf children like we had back around 1850’s or so? We lost a lot of genuine(deaf and hearing) teachers after that Milan 1880 Language Eugenic Act,…. or what is it call?
The Deaf community right now have a lot of problems in many different aspects and I think once we get bilingual program set up soon, the prosperity of the Deaf community will come to a reality sooner and many other problems will be solved.
Bilingually Yours,
John
Posted on April 30th, 2007 by egbertpress
Filed under: Uncategorized
Thanks for bringing this up. There are far too many hearing professionals and parents fighting viciously to protect the oralism. It will never happen that they open their mind to change to bilingual programs. It would take years for deaf schools or deaf programs to adopt that. There are so many resistments against that even though there are researches that show that it is very benefitting for deaf children. How to solve these problems? I wonder about that. Deaf children go on suffering as usual. That does not have to happen!
That’s lame excuse. Real reason is resistance to the concept of BiBi approach.
Utah encountered that and took 5 years of charter school to prove otherwise.
Now, Utah is hoping for a new superintendent who will be more friendly to begin after June 22.
I wholeheartly agree with you. Also I feel one of major obstacles is misunderstandings. For instance I recently visited a cochlear implant program at a hospital nearby and I found out that those doctors thought that ASL programs would involve rejecting oral English (speech). They were surprised when I explained that oral English is a vital componment of any true bilingual-bicultural program.
Also I believe misconception is an issue as well. Alot of people claim they support bi-bi approach but do not truly understand what it truly means. I have seen people who claim to support bi-bi completely taking out English out of the equation.
Hey, I used to be in a Deaf Education program, and most students in it couldn’t sign their way out of a paper bag (myself included.) This is exactly true. You cannot take four sign classes and expect to be fluent. There is absolutely NO WAY. (Four sign classes was all my program required.) I don’t know if you remember Barb DiGIi’s vlog with her children, and she was talking to her son about the meaning of the horse “carting” something, and she was questioning why he chose the sign he did, whether it was conceptually accurate or not. She was able to catch that, and converse with him fluently. Many deaf education teachers cannot do that, and that is why the reading levels of many deaf children are so low. If you can’t communicate effectively, how are you supposed to be able to teach children to read? Hearing children have enough problems with that, and their teachers speak the same native language. This is a HUGe issue, thanks for bringing it up.
To W. David Samuelsen,
Lame excuse?
I am sorry, I don’t follow what you mean by that.
And what do you mean by “Real reason is resistance to the concept of BiBi approach”. Could you clarify more about its concept of the resistance?
And also your hoping of having a new superintendent who will be more friendly after June 22nd? Is the present superintendent unfriendly towards deaf children or parents?
Samuelsen, many parents want their deaf children to have better education and there are problems that needs to be rectified and we need to be more specific so we can be more effective in our debates to achieve the goal to have better education for deaf children.
There are many parents right now that are desperated to have their deaf children to be in respectable education settings and they need us to work on this issue now.
Hope that we can work together.
John