SASLJ Vol. 2 No. 1 SASLJ Vol 2, No 1 | Page 44

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 44