Unlocking the Curriculum
Johnson et al.
and ASL found in SSS and the generally impoverished quality of the signed portion of the signal
may provide a model that is counter-productive to the goal of language acquisition.
Quigley and Paul (1984, pp. 19-23) conclude that there are no studies demonstrating that
the SSS movement has been successful in promoting English achievement. In examining what
they call the most favorable evidence in support of each approach to deaf education, they find that
results favoring any one of the approaches can usually be explained by an intervening variable,
such as socio-economic status, literacy and educational level of the parents, or personal
involvement of the parents. They find no unequivocal evidence in support of the practices
associated with Total Communication.
It is still widely believed, however, that ASL, while possibly a nice means of
communicating socially, is unsuited for the educational process. In fact, both the official
statements and the common practice in American deaf education suggest that those in charge of
educational institutions still believe that early sign language exposure inhibits the learning of
speech. In a recent debate in the magazine Deaf Life, the superintendent of a state residential school
for deaf children, made the following comments (Bellefleur, 1988, p. 23):
ASL is a beautiful, conceptual language, and I truly believe that it has an important
place in the proliferation of a deaf sub-culture, but it has no place in the education
process, if deaf citizens ever wish to compete with their hearing counterparts, with
any kind of efficiency.
. . . When I ask myself why those individuals would use written English to support
a language that dispossesses its users, I have to wonder if the subconscious motives
of the advocates might actually be to keep their constituents in a state of
impoverished language.
Because of views such as this it is unusual to find deaf teachers in public school programs
for deaf children. Most deaf teachers work in residential schools, but even here it is still common
practice throughout the United States to put them in the upper grades or with developmentally
retarded children where they will have less impact on the language use of the ordinary deaf children
(Moores, 1987, p. 205). Thus, the deaf education system, in which over 42 percent of teachers
were themselves deaf in the 1870's, was able to reduce that proportion to less than 12 percent by
the 1960's (Lou, 1988, p. 76). This has been accomplished primarily through the argument that
deaf teachers are poorly suited to speech-centered methodologies and by perpetuation of the
misconception that sign language exposure and acquisition at an early age impedes the acquisition
of spoken English and appropriate "hearing world" behavior. We suggest that this trend has been
intimately linked to the difficulty deaf students encounter in attempting to acquire the contents of
the curriculum.
On the other side of the issue is a fact that has been recognized by researchers for many
years: deaf children of deaf parents on average achieve higher levels of proficiency in school-
related skills than do children from all-hearing families (Stevenson, 1964; Stuckless & Birch,
1966; Meadow, 1968; Vernon & Koh, 1970; Corson, 1973; Brasel & Quigley, 1977; Moores,
1987, pp. 198-205). In all of these studies, children from deaf families consistently outperform
children from hearing families in most measures of academic achievement. Moreover, in most of
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No. 2 – Fall/Winter 2018
100