The effects on metalinguisticawareness of an experimental bilingual program for deaf children

LINGUISTICS AND EDUCATION 2, 345-364 (1990)

The Effects on Metalinguistic Awareness of an Experimental

Bilingual Program for Deaf Children

MICHAEL STRONG

ASA DEMATTEO

University of California, San Francisco

This article reports on an investigation of the effects of an experimental bilingual ASL/English syllabus on melalingulstic awareness for young deaf children. A special curriculum was created, centering on the Idling of stories first in ASL only, and later in both ASL and English. The purpose was to improve metalinguistic awareness as represented by an ability to distinguish between the two sign language varieties of ASL and signed English. The curriculum was piloted 2 to 5 hours a week for 14 months with a group of kindergarten children at a residential school for the deaf. Each subject was matched with a control child at another school where the experimental program was not taught. The children were given pre- and posttests for metalinguistic ability. Results indicated that the exposure to the syllabus increased mefolinguistic skills significantly for the experimental group, but that the control group experienced no such increase.

Deaf chi ldren in Amer ican schools are offered a variety of educat ional and language alternatives. They may be exposed to oral English, where emphasis is placed on speech discr iminat ion, lip reading, use of aided residual hearing, and speech reading. Alternatively, their teachers may use some form of sign language in place of, or, more likely, in addition to spoken English. The signed input may take one of any number of forms ranging from an approximat ion to Amer ican Sign Language (ASL), if the teacher is deaf (most are hearing, see Woodward,

This research was funded by NIDRR (formerly NItlR) grant #G008300146 to the University of California, San Francisco, Center on Deafness, and by a grant to the first author from the UCSF Academic Senate. The authors would like to thank ttenry Klopping, Jacob Arcanin, Marianne Deluca, and Pat Dorrance for making it possible to study at their school, and to Nancy Eldridge, Norma Richards, and Rosemary Marshall, the teachers who welcomed us into their classrooms with such good humor. Kathee Keller also went out of her way to give support and assistance at the control site. Suzy Bank-Schamberg provided much help on storytelling techniques. Most of all, the experimental program owes its success to Joyann Burdett, teacher extraordinaire, and tireless supporter of this approach. Thanks, too, to the children who both accepted and ignored us in just the right proportions, who willingly took part in extra tests, and who at times stayed on after school in order for the program to continue.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Michael Strong, Director of Research, Center on Deafness, Box 1208, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143.

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346 M. Strong and A. DeMatteo

Allen, & Schildroth 1988), a mixture of ASL and English signs, commonly referred to as Pidgin Sign English (PSE), or it may be predominantly a system of Manually Coded English (MCE). Whatever the approach, deaf children have great difficulty learning English, typically leaving high school with an average fourth-grade reading ability (see, e.g., Trybus & Karchmer, 1977).

It is clear that the difficulties with English acquisition encountered by deaf children arise largely from the restrictions imposed by hearing loss on the intake of language delivered through the oral/aural channel. It would seem, however, that language delivered via a visual/manual modality would not cause such problems. One would expect, based on such a premise, that deaf children presented with signed English would be able to acquire the language at normal rates, as long as the presentation represented English fully. Along these same lines, deaf children who are exposed to both ASL and MCE might be predicted to perform similarly to hearing bilingual children. However, there are several ways in which the situation for deaf children is quite unlike other bilingual settings.

Some studies of children who receive MCE in school (e.g., Kluwin, 1981; Marmor & Petitto, 1979; Strong & Charlson, 1987) show that the input is degraded in ways that make it difficult, if not impossible, for learners to divine the rules of English from presentation in this manner. The main reason for this is that the teachers sign and speak English simultaneously, with the result that the language, particularly the signed component, is incomplete and inconsistent.

Furthermore, the relationship between ASL and MCE is unique in a number of ways that make the learning environment different from that experienced by hearing children exposed to two languages. Usually, if two languages can be said to be related, the relationship is either genetic, that is, the languages have some common ancestor or family of ancestors, or the relationship is based on features that arise from their contact in a process of pidgin formation and subsequent creolization (Bickerton, 1981): These issues of genetic features and features arising from the languages in contact are quite complex for ASL and MCE.

First, MCE does not have its own lexicon, but predominantly substitutes ASL signs for English words. In addition, there are mechanisms for creating novel signs. For example, one can add to an ASL sign a hand shape indicating the first letter of the English word to be represented by that sign. Thus, the ASL sign which has the meaning of "group of people" can be made with an initial "f" for MCE "family," "g" for "group," or " t" for "team" (Gustason, Pfetzing, & Zawolkow, 1980). Another mechanism is to concatenate two ASL signs to form English compounds, such as ASL SCOTCH and TAPE for English "Scotch tape," SHOE and STRING for English "shoestring" (Bomstein, Saulnier, & Hamilton, 1983). There are single ASL signs which cover these semantic domains (see, e.g., TAPE and SHOELACE in Sternberg, 1981).

The shared lexicon creates unusual complications in the relationship between ASL and MCE. Consider, for example, these two sentences:

Metalinguistic Awareness in Deaf Children 347

(I.I) I am yesterday with the train to Berlin gegone. (1.2) I went to Berlin by train yesterday.

Even though a native English speaker might comprehend the meaning of 1.1, which is using the grammar of German with an English lexicon, he or she would immediately recognize, by virtue of native speaker competence, that 1.2 is English, whereas 1. I is not. The linear aspects of vocal languages are generally crucial to meaning: Either the language tends toward fixed word order, or toward inflectional features which, owing to the sequential nature of the vocal stream, must also be linear. Thus 1.1 is "un" English not because it fails to use English vocabulary, but because it violates the linear constraints of the grammar. ASL, and indeed all natural sign languages, are not so linearly constrained, although they are constrained in other ways (Bellugi, 1989; Klima & Bellugi, 1979). ASL is highly structured and encodes meaning through a variety of mechanisms: Among others these include signs for specific semantic objects, nonspecific signs for semantic features which are used in general descriptions (e.g., size and shape classifiers and other meaning-carrying handshapes), inflectional processes of different kinds, meaning-carrying facial expressions, spatial mapping within the normal signing space, and various anaphoric mechanisms. Many of these features are encoded simultaneously rather than sequentially. The linear aspects of the language are much less important. Thus, when MCE borrows ASL lexical items, it frequently results that the MCE sentence is quite similar, or even identical, to the corresponding ASL sentence. In the following examples:

(2.1) I LOVE MY DOG (2.2) MY DOG I LOVE (2.3) DOG MY LOVE (2.4) I LOVE THEIR DOG

(2.1) could be signed in exactly the same way in MCE or ASL. ASL would also allow (2.2), which MCE would only marginally allow, and (2.3), which MCE would not allow. (2.4) could be signed exactly the same way in MCE or ASL, or the ASL version could vary by a lateral movement of the indexical sign THEIR.

Another complication of the shared lexicon is nonmatching domains, both semantic and syntactic, for the ASL sign and the English word it is intended to represent. For example, the sign FINISH means a completed action in ASL and is added as an aspect marker to verbs. Its distribution in ASL is vastly different from the word "finish" in English, though the sign is used for that English word in MCE. Similarly, expression of the concept of time in ASL includes two signs typically glossed as "time," one of which is punctual (e.g., What time is it?), and the other durational (e.g., The time of the Jurassic age lasted from 180 to 135 million years ago). Thus, two sentences using similar signs, but one having as its

348 5I. Strong and A. DeMatteo

intention MCE and the other ASL, might have quite different denotative and connotative values. For example, the concatenation of HE, WORK, and LATE would mean "He works late" if its intention were MCE, but "He has not yet come to work" if its intention were ASL.

Secondly, the sociolinguistic domains of the two languages are different. ASL is a natural language, use of which implies membership in the Deaf community, while MCE systemg were created for pedagogical purposes, not for daily conversational use. Nonetheless, code switching between ASL, MCE, and PSE occurs regularly outside of pedagogical settings, the form of language varying according to the background of the signer, the interlocutor, and the setting in which the exchange takes place. Thus, although the languages are distinct, the identity of any given signed utterance may be in question in a way that it would not be in other bilingual environments such as, for example, with Spanish or Italian (although these languages share a number of cognates and grammatical rules).

The social context of sign language acquisition is also unique. While deaf children of deaf parents most often acquire ASL at normal developmental rates, deaf children of heating parents (i.e., about 90% of the deaf population) usually arrive at school with no developed first language of any kind. Their experience of sign language encompasses imperfectly signed English from a parent (Swisher, 1984) or a teacher (e.g., Strong & Charlson, 1987), ASL and PSE of various forms from peers, and ad hoc gestural or mimetic communication. Most deaf children, therefore, receive inadequate input for figuring out the rules of either ASL or English, or even for recognizing that the two are, in fact, distinct. Thus, the relationship between ASL and MCE is such that it cannot be taken for granted that a language learner will automatically become able to distinguish one from the other.

The problem for deaf children is that many of them do not become successful bilinguals. Bilingualism may be seen as occurring in degrees, from a successful, or balanced, bilingual, who is fully fluent in both languages, to a partial bilingual, who is fluent in one language but limited in the other, and a limited bilingual who is deficient in both languages. When bilingualism is represented by only limited abilities in both languages, it is termed "semilingualism" (Cum- mins, 1979). We have seen that most deaf children start school without a developed first language. Moreover, once at school they do not benefit from clearly separated language environments, either linguistically or sociolinguistically, with respect to ASL and MCE, and so may go for many years without understanding that there are two languages contributing to the input to which they are exposed. We have also seen that the language input at school is insufficient for rule acquisition in either language, resulting in their becoming semilinguals.

Cummins (1979) suggests that hearing semilinguals (i.e., language minority children in the United States who come to school with less than native levels of skill in both first and second languages as a result of unsystematic exposure to both languages at home), suffer academically. Other researchers (beginning with


Peal & Lambert, 1962) have found potentially beneficial effects of successful bilingualism on intellectual functioning and academic achievement. Deaf children, as semilinguals, may be denied these benefits, and indeed suffer the conse- quences of their language deficits.

Studies of hearing children who acquire two languages simultaneously consistently refer to the early age (usually before three) at which these children become aware of their bifingualism, are able to translate from one language to the other, and acquire the abstract idea of language (e.g., Burling, 1959; Fantini, 1985; Leopold, 1939-49; Ronjat, 1913). Fantini (1985) maintains that, forhis child:

The separateness of environments in which each language was acquired and the consistency of language use within each of these environments were probably significant facts which facilitated early and successful language distinction (p. 192)

The process of acquiring sensitivity to the separateness of the two languages in bilinguals appears to be early evidence of the ability to reflect upon and speculate about language, known as metalinguistic awareness, and is an important part of becoming a successful bilingual.

Some researchers have specifically examined the relationship between bilingualism and metalinguistic awareness. Tunmer and Myhill (1984) and Lom- bardi (1986), in discussing this research, maintain that the process of separating tWO.!.languages into functionally independent systems results in increased meta- cognitive ability and strengthened metalinguistic awareness. Bilingualism, in other words, enhances metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic awareness, in turn, becomes a primary variable mediating the positive effects of bilingualism on academic achievement. Furthermore, metalinguistic awareness has been found to be related to proficiency in the target language among second language learners (Arthur, 1980; Bialystock, 1979; Gass, 1982; Jordens, 1977; Kellerman, 1977; Singh, d'Anglejan, & Carroll, 1982).

There is some debate as to whether training in metalinguistic awareness might enhance language skills per se. Tunmer and Bowey (1984) argue that the development of metalinguistic abilities in children is central to learning to read, while Ehri and Wilce (1980, quoted by Tunmer & Bowey) maintain that phonological awareness is a consequence of as much as a prerequisite to learning to read words. Since many of the skills taught to beginning readers involve aspects of speculating on language such as sentence and word structure, it is difficult to establish which skill results from which. What seems to be true for bilinguals, however, is that both language acquisition, metalinguistic awareness, and school achievement are impeded as long as confusion exists regarding distinctions between the two languages. We suggest that the ability to separate the two languages for bilinguals might be seen as an initial, potentially trainable, stage of metalinguistic awareness which must be acquired in order for successful lan-


guage acquisition to take place. This ability may be all the more critical for deaf children, for whom the confusion between ASL and MCE continues at school. If linguistic and social contexts do not enable this awareness to develop, it must be achieved through formal means in the classroom.

HYPOTHESIS

The central purpose of this study was to measure the effects on metalinguistic abilities of an experimental bilingual ASL/English curriculum for young deaf children. Specifically, their sensitivity to distinctions between the two sign systems was measured. It was hypothesized that deaf children of this age would not be able to discriminate between ASL and MCE utterances under test conditions without exposure to a curriculum which would train them to identify differences. The research hypothesis is in two parts as follows:

I. Untrained deaf children (i.e., those who have not participated in the experimental program) will perform at chance level on a test of sign language recognition.

2. Trained deaf children (i.e., those exposed to an experimental ASL/English storytelling curriculum) will perform significantly better than untrained deaf children on a test of sign language recognition.

M E T I I O D

Subjects Sixteen children, ranging in age from 4 to 7 years, participated in the project. Eight of the children received the experimental educational program and the other eight served as controls. The experimental students were enrolled in a kindergarten class at a residential school for the deaf on the West Coast of the United States. The school operated a total communication program, with teachers signing and speaking simultaneously, loosely adhering to the sign system Signing Exact English, known as SEE II. The children were originally selected by the two kindergarten teachers as having no handicaps other than deafness, and no significant behavioral or emotional problems. There were six girls and two boys, ranging in age from 5.2 to 6.4 at the start of the program. In order to achieve control over extraneous variables, groups were matched in the following way: Each subject was matched with a control from one of four kindergarten classes at another Western U.S. residential school for the deaf espousing the same educational and communication philosophy. Matches were based on the following criteria, in descending order of priority:

1. Hearing status of parents (deaf or hearing) 2. Age (plus or minus six months)

Metalinguistie Awareness in Deaf Children 351

3. Degree of hearing loss (either "severe" or "profound") 4. School residency (living at home or at school) 5. Gender 6. Pretest scores'in A S L (ranking within the group, plus

position) or minus one

The first three criteria were met for all pairs. Items 4 and 5 were satisfied for six of the eight pairs, and item 6 for five pairs. See Table 1 for the display of attributes of each pair.

Curriculum A bilingual ASL/English curriculum suitable for young deaf children was de- vised especially for this study. The curriculum (see Appendix 1 and Strong, 1988) centered on a series of stories, and was divided into two parts. Part One, consisting of ten units, was created around ten different stories told in ASL. Each unit focused on one or more functional and grammatical elements of the language, which were expanded and elaborated through a series of guided activities including role playing, story retelling, quizzes, games, picture drawing, and question-answer sessions. Ten more units formed the second half of the curriculum, each one based on a new story. This time, however, stories were presented on videotape, once in ASL and once in English signs (using the SEE II system). The ASL stories were signed by the female experimental teacher, a native user of AS L, the English stories by a highly skilled hearing male sign language interpret-

TABLE 1 Characteristics of the Eight Malched Pairs

Pairs

Variable ! 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Parents did did h/h hlh h/h h/h hth h/h Age 5 + / 5 + 6/5+ 5/5+ 6/5+ 5+/6 6 + / 6 + 5+/6 616+ IlL pip pip pip pip pip sis sis sis Residency n/n n/n n/n n/n n/y n/n y/n y/y Gender m/m f/m f/f f/f f/f f/m m/m f/f ASL Rank 4/I 1/2 6/5 5/4 8/6 3/3 7/8 2/7

KEg d = deaf h = hearing p = profound s = severe n ~ no y = yes m = male f = female

352 M. Strong and A. DeMatleo

er who was able to sign consistently and completely. The focus on Part II was on introducing several elementary English constructions and showing how the same function is performed differently in ASL and in English. Students were encour- aged to identify differences between the two versions of the stories, with the teacher guiding them to the focal points of each particular unit.

Experimental Procedure A deaf teacher, employed at the junior high school level in the same school, taught one lesson a day with the experimental group. She had taught'for more than twelve years at various grade levels, including elementary school. She was a native signer of ASL, born of two deaf parents, and was also fluent in MCE. Prior to the experimental teaching sessions, she received training in storytelling from a professional ASL storyteller, who also collaborated in selecting stories for the curriculum. Much of this training took the form of videotaping the teacher telling a story, and subsequent tape review, discussion, and retaping. The training period extended over two months, during which time the teacher also roughed out lesson plans, collected teaching materials, and developed classroom activities. She was paid for the out-of-school hours spent on these activities. She began teaching the experimental class in January of 1985. She visited the class each day at the same time for a 50-min lesson. During this time the regular teacher remained in the class as an interested observer, but did not participate in the lesson. Ilaving a storyteller in class was not a particularly special event for

�9 these children: A staff person had been coming into the classroom for this purpose. During the course of this study, she was replaced by the experimental teacher, who visited more frequently.

There were three major aspects of the experimental program which set it aside from regular classroom activities. First, the teacher conducted her lessons in ASL rather than in simultaneously signed and spoken English. Use of ASL in this way served both to capitalize on any benefits that might accrue from using the natural language of the deaf community, and to legitimize the use of ASL as a formal language of instruction. Secondly, the teacher was deaf. Thus, she em- bodied an identifiable role model who was a true native user of ASL, and also provided a source of ASL in maximal contrast to the English signer. Thirdly, the curriculum itself was newly created specifically for the purpose of introducing English through ASL.

Appendix 1 outlines the content of each unit in the curriculum. A typical unit, which would take one or two weeks of lessons to complete, followed a consistent pattern of activities. In the first part, where stories were presented in ASL only, the children would start a new unit by acting out scenes from the story, drawing pictures, and asking and answering questions. Later, they would practice retelling the story in their own words. Throughout the unit, the teacher would monitor the children's use of the particular functional or grammatical elements upon which the lesson focused, finally eliciting examples through individual conversa- tions about the story with each child. In this manner she was able to evaluate


their knowledge of a particular function. In the second part of the curriculum, lessons were directed towards comparative presentations of the stories in the two languages, ASL and MCE. Many of the activities were the same as for the first part; however, after the initial videotaped presentation of the two versions of the story, the lesson always continued with a discussion comparing the two stories. The teacher would elicit ideas from the students on how the versions were different. At first, answerssuch as "One was a man, one was a woman" were offered. Soon, however, language-sensitive responses were received, such as observations about the form or movement of particular signs. This kind of response enabled the teacher to initiate a lesson on differences between the two languages.

Part I of the syllabus continued until the end of the school year in June, with a break during the school testing period in May, when the experimental teacher was not available to teach the extra class. Teaching resumed in the Fall of 1985. By then the subjects had moved to a new class with a different schedule, at which time it was arranged for the children to stay on after school for 35 min three days per week. Part I of the syllabus was repeated in the Fall, and Part II was started in December, 1985, continuing through May, 1986. Meanwhile, the control subjects at the other school continued with their regular program, consisting of all subjects taught by a heating teacher using MCE simultaneously presented with spoken English.

Testing Experimental subjects were given a language recognition test prior to the start of the experimental teaching and at its conclusion. Control subjects were tested at the same intervals, but without the intercalated teaching. This recognition task consisted of four practice items along with a set of 12 utterances signed by a deaf bilingual, some in ASL and some in English (see Appendix 2). The sentences varied according to whether they had one, two, or three components which identified the language in question. Subjects were instructed to indicate whether each was signed in ASL or English. Care was taken to insure that the students had some understanding of the difference being asked about. Specifically, the students were instructed to pick out those sentences which were signed more like their teacher (i.e., MCE) or more like a prominent deaf adult familiar to the student (e.g., a classroom aide or dorm counselor). Responses were noted on the spot by the researcher conducting the test and later scored giving one point for each correct answer. The first round of testing took place in December, 1984, and January, 1985, prior to the start of the experimental teaching program. The posttest was administered in April and May of 1986.

RESULTS

From Table 2 it can be seen that the experimental and control groups performed similarly on the pretest, with mean scores of 5.6 and 5.9, respectively, out of a


TABLE 2 Means and Standard Deviations of Scores on Pre- and Posttests

of Sign Language Recognition

Pretest Posttest

Group N M SD Range N M SD Range

Experimental 8 5.6 1.69 4 8 8.5 1.20 3 Control 8 5.9 .99 3 8 6.5 1.38 3

TABLE 3 Kruska l -Wal l l s Compar ison of Gain Scores on Posttest

of Sign Language Recognition

Mean Group M SD Range Rank F p

Experimental 2.88 2.23 7.0 11.5 8.696 < 0.02 Control 0.25 1.17 3.0 5.5

possible 11 correct. These means did not differ significantly or substantively from the mean of 5.5 that would be expected with random responding, t These results suggest that most children, whether in the experimental or the control group, were guessing. Subsequent to the program, control subjects continued test performance neither significantly nor substantively different from chance expec- tations,2 whereas experimental subjects' scores improved significantly over those to be expected had they been guessing (Z = 7.09, p < .0001). In order to test between-group differences, gain scores for each child were computed and the distributions compared for experimental versus control children using the Kruskal-Wallis Test (Kruskal & Wallis, 1952; Marascuilo & McSweeney, 1977). Under this analysis, experimental subjects receiving the ASL/English storytelling curriculum showed significantly greater gains in language recognition than control subjects (F = 8.696, p < .02). Thus, the hypotheses were confirmed.

DISCUSSION

The results presented here show that the experimental subjects in this study developed a component of metalinguistic awareness which they did not have prior to the experimental program, and which control subjects neither had at the

1Although the within-group variances of the two groups were different, an Fma x test for homoge- neity of variance failed to detect a significant difference between the variances of the two groups (see Appendix 3 for raw scores).

21t should be noted that two of the subjects in the control group were unable to complete the testing task. These two subjects' data were removed from post-intervention analyses and their gain scores, for obvious reasons, counted as zero.


beginning of the study, nor developed independently during the time the study ran. Specifically, experimental subjects were better able than the control group to distinguish between ASL and MCE when presented with the two languages under experimental conditions after having been exposed to the ASL/English curriculum. If this curriculum were indeed instrumental in compensating for the confusing linguistic and sociolinguistic environment in which these children find themselves, it may represent an important first step towards successful bilingualism and, hence, increased academic performance.

These results also have implications for the notion of metalinguistic awarenes's as a trainable skill: The experimental group apparently improved in their ability to discriminate between ASL and MCE by identifying linguistic cues as a result of classroom exercises focusing on the differences between the two languages. If such ability is an initial stage of metalinguistic awareness, then it would suggest not only that such skills are trainable, but also that such training is desirable, especially for deaf children exposed to sign language.

It may be argued that the children in the experimental group improved significantly on the recognition task because the special curriculum trained them di- rectly to perform this test. Although the curriculum does indeed focus on differences between the two languages, the test itself was not practiced during the treatment period, suggesting at least that the curriculum did in fact result in increased ability to discem distinguishing characteristics of ASL and MCE. Other critics may hypothesize that the children were responding to distinguishing features other than those imposed by the experimenters, such as differences in gaze or some irrelevant characteristic involuntarily produced by the signer. Eveh if this were true, it does not explain why those in the experimental group would respond to these features whereas those in the control group did not. Neither group encountered the signer of the test sentences outside the test situation.

It should also be recognized that, since the control group received no special treatment at all, the study is open to questio n concerning the potential influence of a "Hawthorne Effect." Critics making this point would want to claim that any differences in performance may be attributable to the effects of being involved in special treatment, and would possibly have been recorded no matter what form that special treatment took.

The unique language environment of deaf children exposed to sign languages is a potentially useful setting for expanding our understanding of metalinguistic awareness and the effects of differing degrees of bilingual input on language acquisition. Conversely, if significant advances are to be made in deaf education, those involved must be aware of advances in related disciplines such as developmental psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and bilingual education;. they must be open to new approaches in their own field; and they must be able to exercise patience while these approaches are researched. The study described in this article initiates a small movement in this direction by bringing a theoretical perspective on school language acquisition from outside the field of deaf education, developing a new approach for deaf learners based on this perspective, and

356 51. Strong and A. DeMatteo

at tempt ing to initiate research into its potential effect iveness . Add to this the fact

that the new program involves Amer i can Sign Language , and several barriers are

broken in the process . It remains to be seen whether others will cons ider further

invest igat ion with this approach to be worthwhi le .

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Woodward, J,, Allen, T., & Schildroth, A. (1988). Linguistic and cultural role models for hearing- impaired children in elementary school programs. In M. Strong (Ed.), Language learning and deafness (pp. 184-191). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

APPENDIX 1 ASLIEnglish Storytelling Syllabus

Created by Michael Strong, James Woodward, and Suzy Bank-Schamberg

Center on Deafness University of California, San Francisco

PART 1--ASL

This syllabus has been designed for use with deaf children, ages 4 -7 , who are in an environment such'as a residential school, where ASL tends to be the principal language of social interaction. Part 1 is divided into ten units, each of which focuses on one or more functional/grammatical features of ASL. Part 2 has ten units, each of which serves as a very elementary introduction to an aspect of English structure that varies greatly in surface features from ASL. Each unit is based on a different story which incorporates the linguistic material to be introduced. The purposes are: (a) to introduce ASL into the classroom curriculum, providing reinforcement for those children of deaf parents who are already fluent in the language, at/east in conversational settings, and giving instruction in the language for other children who have less developed linguistic Skills; and (b) to introduce English as a language distinct from ASL, by teaching a few simple basic examples of how the two languages might differently express the same idea.

358 M. Strong and A. DcMatteo

Unit One

Story: Goldilocks and the 3 Bears

1. Referring to people and things (Pronouns).

This focuses on indexic reference with referents present and absent, scene setting, and includes possessives (your, his, etc.), reflexives (yourself, myself), and number incorporation (the three-of-you, etc.).

2. Describing (Word order).

This illustrates the sign order of noun followed by descriptor which is common in ASL but not acceptable in English.

Unit Two

Story: One Fine Day

1. Expressing location and direction (Locational and directional verbs).

This unit will introduce verbs which maintain the same orientation, such as "give," "show, . . . . tell," "go sit," and those which involve a change in orientation, such as "ask," "say no," "fly."

Unit Three

Story: The Little Red IIen

1. Asking questions.

This part of the unit focuses on how to ask yes/no questions in ASL with appropriate sign order and facial expression.

2. Saying "no."

Various forms of the negative are introduced here.

Unit Four

Story: The l lare and the Tortoise

1. Locating and moving living and inanimate things (Classifiers).

This will focus on location and movement in classifiers, while ignoring handshape.


2. Describing action (Adverb incorporation).

This focuses on how to modulate verbs of action to indicate movement, for example, fast, slow, stop/start; and nature, for example, careless.

Unit Five

Story: Amos and Boris

1. Representing people and things (Handshape classifiers and some Size and Shape Specifiers).

This unit focuses on the different handshapes used in ASL for representing persons, cars, and objects of varying sizes, shapes, and patterns.

Unit Six

Story: The Boy Who Cried Wolf

1. Talking about events that have already happened, are happening now, or will happen sooner or later (Time line).

This unit introduces the ASL time line, or the way tense is marked in that language. The story introduces different points on the time line such as: yesterday, ago, distant past, a few days, weeks ago, recently, tomorrow, will, a few days from now, soon, and so forth.

Unit Seven

Story: The Three Little Pigs

1. Describing how you do things (Temporal aspect).

This focuses on the facial expressions and sign movements that represent the marking of verbs for temporal aspect to express ideas such as: "again and again," "continuously."

2. Describing the order in which actions are carried out (Distributional aspect).

This covers the movements attached to verb signs when marked for distributional aspect, for example, "you, then you, then you"; or "all of you together."

3. Expressing completion or incompletion (Aspect marked syntactically).

This introduces the important ASL concepts "finish" and "not yet."


Unit Eight

Story: The Three Billy Goats Gruff

1. Identifying and emphasizing topics (Topicalization).

This focuses on word order adjustments and facial expressions that are used to emphasize or draw attention to particular aspects of an utterance.

Unit Nine

Story: Sylvester and the Magic Pebble

1. Expressing doubt or uncertainty (Conditionals).

Simple conditionals are introduced using the correct sign order and facial expression.

2. Giving more information about persons or things (Relative Clauses).

Again, sign order and facial expression are the means to relativize in ASL.

3. Asking questions (Wh-questions).

This focuses on how to form wh-questions in ASL using the correct vocabulary, facial expression and sign order, for example, repetition of question word at the end of the sentence).

Unit Ten

Story: The Lion and the Rat

1. Specifying action (Object incorporation).

This introduces some ASL verbs which can be modified to incorporate the object such as: "chop tree," "close window."

2. Notin-verb distinction.

Finally some noun/verb pairs are introduced, that share the same sign but are distinguished only by an additional movement, for example, "sit/chair," "drive/car," "fly/plane."

A unit normally takes at least one week and possibly two weeks of classroom

Metalinguistlc Awareness in Deaf Children 361

time, at one hour per day. Stories have been chosen to facilitate the appropriate focus/foci for the particular unit, but frequently include elements from other units.

PART 2 m E N G L I S H

In Part 2 the focus is on introducing several elementary English constructions and showing how the same function is performed differently in ASL and English.. Each story is told first in English then in ASL, with the teacher continuing to use ASL as the medium of instruction.

Unit One

Story: The Little Girl and the Big Bear

1. Referring to people and things (Pronouns).

This unit introduces the English nominative pronouns, as represented by the English sign system Signing Exact English (SEE I1).

Unit Two

Story: The Beautiful Rat

1. Describing (Basic word order of the English noun phrase: article, adjective, noun).

The purpose of this unit is to introduce the definite article and focus on the English word order adjective + noun in comparison to the ASL word order noun + adjective. (Although the English word order is acceptable in ASL also, the differing forms are presented in order to reinforce the concept of two distinct languages.)

Unit Three

Story: Where Can an Elephant Itide?

1. Saying "no" (Negatives).

This unit is restricted to introducing the English forms "no" and "not," and the contractions "can't ," "don't ," and "won't ."

362 M. Strong and A. DeManeo

Unit Four

Story: Jack and the Beanstalk

1. Prepositions.

Some of the most frequently used English prepositions are introduced here, particularly in environments where ASL would normally incorporate them into the verb.

Unit Eight

Story: Cinderella

1. Asking questions.

This unit introduces.the wh-question words with the verb "to be," and yes/no questions of the form "do you . . . . " "did you . . . . " and "can I . . ."

Unit Five

Story: The l lorse, the Fox, and the Lion This unit introduces a number of English adverbs, most of which involve the suffix -LY which is represented in SEE II as a separate sign tagged on to the adjective sign, for example, SLOW-LY; ttAPPY-LY, and so forth.

Unit Six

Story: Hansel and Gretel

1. Describing things that have happened or will happen (Past and future tenses).

The simplest forms of the past and future tense are introduced in this unit. Thus the sign PAST following an English verb is used to indicate past time, and the sign FUTURE before the verb is used for future time, in accordance with the SEE II system.

Unit Seven

Story: The Magic Porridge Pot

1. Talking about things that are happening now (Present progressive, habitual).

This unit introduces the two verb inflections, -ING, and -S for the third person singular, and also the verb "to be" (copula) in the present tense.

Metalinguistic Awareness in Deaf Children

Unit Nine

Story: Little Wood Duck

1.

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Giving more information about persons or things (Relative clauses).

This introduces the use of "who" and "that" in English relative clauses.

Unit Ten

Story: Leo the Lop

1. Expressing doubt or uncertainty (Conditionals).

This is difficult and should be included only if the children have mastered the present and future tense forms.

APPENDIX 2 Stimulus Utterances for the Language Recognition Task

Practice Items

1. IT IS RAINING tlARD TODAY (E) 2. RAIN + + TODAY (A) 3. LIVE CALIFORNIA ENJOY? (A) 4. DO YOU LIKE LIVING IN CALIFORNIA (E)

Test Items

1. YOU WILL WALK OVER TO TIlE BRIDGE (E) 2. STORY ME DON'T-KNOW ME (A) 3. EAT FINISIt YOU? (A) 4. CAN HE GO TOMORROW? (E) 5. I SEE ONE BIG DOG (E) 6. MOTORCYCLE TREE-RUN-INTO (A) 7. t iE MUST EAT NOW (E) 8. MOTHER tlELP ME (A) 9. THAT BOY IS WORK-ING NOW (E)

10. BOOK FATHER GIVE ME (A) 11. GIRL PRETTY LIE (A) 12. THIS GIRL RUN-S TO SCHOOL (E) E = signed in Manually Coded English A = signed in American Sign Language


A P P E N D I X 3 Test and Gain Scores for Experimental and Control Groups

Experimental Group Control Group

Pair Pretest Posttest Gain Pretest Posttest Gain

I 7 7 0 6 5 - 1

2 7 9 2 7 6 - I 3 3 I0 7 6 8 2 4 6 9 3 7 7 0 5 3 8 5 5 5 0 6 6 8 2 6 8 2 7 6 7 I 6 - - 0 8 7 I0 3 4 - - 0

Documents

The effects on metalinguisticawareness of an experimental bilingual program for deaf children