Language & Literacy

I had some opportunities this past year to visit and learn from a school here in NYC that is truly unique in the city (and, from what I understand, the country) where deaf and hard of hearing children, hearing children of Deaf adults, and general education children learn side-by-side, all reading, writing, discussing, and signing around the same texts.

I learned a lot from those visits, and have continued trying to learn more about American Sign Language (ASL). Like so many others who have had little exposure to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, I had a lot of ignorance and misconceptions about sign language.

For starters, one of the first things that blew my mind about American Sign Language is that it is not some kind of subtitling or pantomiming of English rendered into the hands. This misconception was something I brought into my first visit: as I watched teachers and students signing and speaking at the same time, I assumed what they were signing was a direct mirror of what they were saying in English.

But what I soon learned was that what I was witnessing was not simply English translated to hands, but rather bimodal bilingualism: two distinct languages in two distinct modalities occurring simultaneously, one vocal, one gestural. One body and mind, running two linguistic systems all at once, in real time. If that's not the definition of translanguaging, I don't know what is.

Because the reality is that ASL is an independent visual-spatial language with its own phonology, morphology, and syntax. In fact, it's barely even related to English.

I have spent years thinking about the auditory environment and its impact on learning (proof here), and embarrassingly little time considering what language looks like when the auditory channel is not available. It has been eye opening, both literally and figuratively, and the more I've read and learned since (I'd suggest beginning with Karen Emmorey's “Ten things you should know about sign languages”), the more I've come to think that sign languages aren't just some niche thing off to the side of general language and literacy.

Instead, I think sign language presents us with a fascinating lens that can magnify so many critical aspects of language and literacy and cognitive inquiry, most especially as a window into grappling with all the complexities related to multilingualism, not to mention an accompanying window into all the complexities related to classifications and accommodations of disability. That's more than I can dig into in one post, so I may write a few more on the topic, as time and fancy may allow.

A parenthesis I didn't fully grok

Go back through what I've written on this blog and you'll find a small parenthetical added at times as a nod towards inclusion: “*spoken (or signed) language*“. I've been dropping it into sentences for a while now (see the inner scaffold posts) due to the presence of teachers from that very same sign language school who joined some of my professional learning sessions (long before I ever had the opportunity to visit their school). They would ask about how to think of sign language in relation to what I was describing with connections between spoken and written language, and they gave me pause to consider it, and to want to raise it as a critical consideration, but I still didn't understand much about it.

I still don't understand much about it. But I am fascinated and want to better understand it.

The current cuts a new channel

When deaf children grow up without much access to any conventional language model (no sign language or accessible speech), they will begin to build their own language. Researchers call these self-generated systems homesign and it points to the intrinsic human drive to communicate (Susan Goldin-Meadow's overview, The Mind Hidden in Our Hands, is a good introduction).

Consider a dammed river. The water will forge a new channel.

I've argued in the past that language, like reading, may not be innate, but closer to a cultural technology shaped across generations that has developed as a perfect fit to the infrastructure of our brains. It may appear that homesign settles the innate-versus-developed question against me.

It hasn't, because it can be said that homesign plateaus after forging that new channel. A homesigner may be able to build a system enough to run a household, but they will then most likely hit a ceiling, because their system of communication only exists isolated within that one household.

In Nicaragua around 1980, deaf children who had each been homesigning in isolation were brought together in schools for the first time. That first cohort then built a community of shared contact, and each new member who joined them began to systematize that communication further. Senghas and Coppola tracked one grammatical device across two cohorts and found that this systematizing came mostly from signers who arrived youngest (<10) and that within two decades they had developed a grammar no adult had ever used.

It took that community, and sequential cohorts of innovation and interacting to form a cultural evolution running within a time frame we could observe. So what is innate, and what is cultural? The drive to communicate lies within each child, and it will find a channel. But a linguistic system develops within a larger community over time, and requires a critical mass.

So consider again that school I described at the beginning, where some children may arrive from homes where their system of communication is homesign and known to no one else. For them school is not only about receiving instruction and gaining literacy and knowledge that connects them to previous generations of human culture. It's also about connecting them to an immediate social community of others they can interact and communicate with more systematically and deeply.

Where ASL comes from

ASL signs are built from combinable units (handshape, location, movement, palm orientation) in the same way spoken words are built from phonemes. And what's even more interesting is what happens at the same time with a signer's face: raised eyebrows mark a yes or no question, particular mouth shapes function as adverbs. Those expressions aren't emotive gestures per se, they're actually more grammatical in function.

There's a lot that's fascinating about ASL itself that I might try to dig into in another post, especially in terms of how a deaf child can learn to read without hearing the phonemes.

But first, here's a surprising thing I also learned about deafness that blew my mind: more than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents (Harden's The Genetic Lottery has a chapter that led me to this). Roughly half of congenital deafness is genetic, and most of that is recessive. The rest has non-genetic causes and isn't inherited at all.

That the majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents makes signing truly unique among the world's languages. What that means is that most of ASL's users may not learn ASL from their parents or family. Instead, they learn ASL within a community of other deaf adults and children.

While one would assume that schools are the natural site for this, the darker truth is that while residential schools did first gather deaf children into the critical mass a language requires, they (for a century after the Milan congress of 1880) banned signing, dismissed Deaf teachers, and punished children for using their hands.

The international body that passed those resolutions apparently didn't repudiate them until 2010.

Sign languages have survived and evolved anyway, in dormitories and playgrounds and Deaf communities, carried from person to person, perhaps often in defiance of the institutions housing them. What such schools supplied may not have been the teaching so much as it was the gathering.

Here is where an interesting tension between civil rights for a disability and civil rights for multilingualism potentially surfaces. I may be over-extrapolating on this, but it seems to me that fewer and fewer deaf children may have an opportunity to gather together in schools today. Under IDEA, the mandate to educate children in a least restrictive environment tends to lead to the mainstreaming of deaf children, and they may thus become distributed across neighborhood schools. By the logic of individual accommodation that's a success.

But sustaining a sign language within an English dominant and speech dominant world requires a community. A placement may be the least restrictive environment available according to the spirit of the term, and simultaneously the most restrictive imaginable socially and linguistically. Now consider this also for deaf students who are also English language learners (somewhere between one in five and one in three of them, though it seems nobody has actually counted since 2014).

Which is why the school I visited struck me the more I learned about it. It isn't just remarkable because it recognizes the beauty of ASL or provides instruction in ASL. It's also remarkable because it serves as a space of Deaf community gathering: Deaf adults, deaf children, hearing classmates, and hearing children of Deaf adults, assembled into a critical mass where bimodal bilingualism is recognized and affirmed.

On one of my visits I passed a student in a hallway signing avidly and fluently with her classmate. The child, I was told, has parents who are hearing and had arrived at school with no signing ability. Her home did not equip her with that new language — the school did. And it did it alongside of a community of adults and children also using sign.

Looking across the channel

Sign languages bring so many interesting questions that should excite any language and literacy nerd out there. If I get my act together, I'd love to explore more about ASL, such as how deaf students can learn to read without sound, and maybe pick some more at the knot of deaf students who are also multilingual learners.

In the meantime, to help bring more interest and information to educators around ASL, I've put together a short guide on American Sign Language covering some of what seemed to be the most important things to know that you might not have known.

Please share if you find it useful, and even more importantly — especially if you are Deaf or hard of hearing, or you teach DHH students, or you interpret — please let me know where I may be missing something or have gotten something wrong.