Unlocking the Curriculum
Johnson et al.
English grammar and the experience with the invented English signs necessary to decode the
teacher's message. The child's competence in ASL grammar would not help because the teacher's
utterances are not structured by ASL grammatical principles.
While it may seem to be too obvious to say, it remains true that, in order to understand
signed utterances built on English syntactic and morphological principles, a child must first be
competent in English. It also remains true that most deaf children arrive at school with little or no
competence in English. These observations combine to suggest that English is not the most
appropriate language to use for instruction in important and valued parts of the curriculum. This
conclusion seems to have escaped the reasoning of those who have designed our current
approaches to instruction for deaf children.
In opposition to this view, proponents of "signed English" assume that systems for
representing English speech make English "visible" to deaf students. This assumption then
becomes support for the expectation that deaf students will acquire signed English competence
naturally through seeing English and that this signed English competence will lead to spoken
English competence and written English competence. The following series of comments from the
inventors Signing Exact English make the assumptions of this approach clear (Gustason, Pfetzing,
& Zawolkow, 1975):
The message is clear. Deaf children must be exposed as young as possible to
English if we want them to learn it well, and since input must precede output we
need to make sure that their perception of the language is as unclouded as possible.
(p. iv)
Signs present larger, more discrete symbols in communication than either speech
or fingerspelling and are thus easier for very young deaf children to pick up. (p. v)
However, American Sign Language is a language in its own right, and this language
is not a visual representation of English.... Its structure is different from that of
English, and the symbols represent concepts rather than English words. A child
learning American Sign Language at an early age has communication, but he must
still learn English if he wishes to function well in our society, and he must learn it
as a different form of communication. Moreover, the difference in structure and
symbolism makes ASL a difficult language for many hearing people to master.
Since most deaf children have hearing parents whose native language is English...,
we suggest that these parents can most comfortably learn to sign English and so
expose their child to their own native language, rather than learn ASL and have the
child later learn English as a second language. (pp. v-vi)
From the time of its introduction to the field, the philosophy and methodology of Total
Communication has depended on the assumption that SSS provides a Visual representation of
English. Denton was among the first proponents of Total Communication in the United States and
oversaw its implementation at the Maryland School for the Deaf in 1968. The following passage
summarizes his view on the developmental functions of SSS (Denton, 1976, p. 6):
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