Reading, Special Education, and Deaf Children
Supalla & Byrne
assert that deaf children understand what a teacher is signing and get a general idea of what is
written in the book.
The purpose of a teacher leading a read-aloud activity with children must be fully
appreciated. Hearing children who participate in the read-aloud activity can listen to the teacher
speaking in English. Critically, the book's text linguistically matches with the spoken English.
Hearing children thus have the opportunity to observe how the teacher models reading and learn
about the importance of reading every word in print. The situation with deaf children and ASL
support is, unfortunately, not the same (i.e., the mismatch of English text and ASL) and the
learning opportunities as discussed for hearing children are thus lost on deaf children.
It is also necessary to consider special education's additional focus on providing deaf
children access to learning activities. With ASL support, it is easy to understand why teachers
believe that they help make the read-aloud activity in the classroom 'accessible' for deaf children.
However, this is deceiving. With ASL gloss, read-aloud activities are authenticated based on the
compatibility of signing and print: a claim that educators cannot make with an ASL support
approach.
The role and use of fingerspelling is also an issue with the ASL support approach. Before
addressing this issue, it is important to recognize the fingerspelling system's function and
relationship to ASL. The English manual alphabet is widely used in the deaf community, which
indicates a difference from other systems discussed earlier as English supports (e.g., Cued
Speech/Language). The fingerspelling system is made up of 26 handshapes representing the letters
of the English alphabet. A deaf individual who uses ASL may spell an English word with the
production of different handshapes in front of the signer in the English text sequence. One example
is B-R-E-A-D. However, since ASL has a sign for this concept, the fingerspelled version would
only be used to communicate the spelling of the English word. In situations where deaf individuals
need to express a name of an object or a proper noun, such as brand names (like Nike and Buick),
fingerspelling is very useful. It is easy to understand why fingerspelling constitutes a small
percentage of all nouns, leaving the larger percentage of nouns as signed words (Padden, 1998).
In addition, some concepts have never been expressed in a signed form, but rather
fingerspelled (e.g., T-A-X-I). With these instances, deaf individuals are expected to fingerspell
certain English words on a regular basis, but such occurrence is rare. And, although fingerspelled
words can become 'lexicalized' involving a particular flow in movement and rapidity of production,
they still look different from signed words. Words in ASL are produced employing various
locations of the signers' body such as the chin area, the temple area, the shoulder area, the stomach
area or in generalized signing space. Additionally, as discussed earlier, all signs involve the use of
a basic handshape. In contrast, fingerspelled words employ a series of handshapes all in one
location (in front of the signer's body). It becomes clear that fingerspelling is not native to ASL as
Brentari and Padden (2001) detail the foreign status of fingerspelled words.
However, a complete understanding about fingerspelling seems to be absent in Garate
(2012) and the VL2 Center. Their attempt to boost the 'merit' of ASL support via fingerspelling as
a manner in which to decode English words in conjunction with ASL is misguided. Garate (2012)
wrote "...the use of both fingerspelling and lexicalized fingerspelling, a morphological process that
brings new signs into ASL from their fingerspelling form, have been used to introduce and teach
new English vocabulary and to facilitate English decoding..." (p. 5). The morphological process
of turning fingerspelled words into signs simply does not exist. The fact that deaf people
predominantly sign and use limited fingerspelling cannot be overlooked. There are thousands of
signs that have no relationship to fingerspelling. Garate (2012) and the VL2 Center need to
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No.1 – Spring/Summer 2018
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