One of my classmates at our community college signed up for ASL to satisfy the foreign language requirement “because it’s just like English.” He was in for quite a surprise.
Don’t tv stations get some kind of benny for having a certain number of hours of their programming designated as community service? I could see how they’d parlay “we have ASL interpreting” into “community service.”
He was not speaking his native tongue. I don’t understand the grammar of ASL. “Yesterday store went I”, or is it “Yesterday store went I, I”.
It’s more like “I went store yesterday I.” For a simple sentence like this, the most important part of the sentence gets repeated at the beginning and end. In this instance, that’s “I”. If it were a question using who, what, when, where, why or how, that word would be the repeated word. So, “where did you go yesterday?” becomes “where you go yesterday where?”.
That is not how the very patient people who try to teach me ASL explain it, but it agrees with experience. 
To mmouse, really? I always felt that the most common reason by far was that ASL speakers have written English as a second language, and it’s not always easy to be completely bilingual at the same time. Although I could see lack of coherent support in the educational system as a close runner up, at least from my experience at Gallaudet as a visiting student. (I was mainstreamed pretty much all my life so I don’t consider myself Deaf, FTR) What other reasons would you include for the lack of expertise besides those?
Sorry if this sounds vaguely incoherent; I’m doing several things at once. Yay for deadlines.
I’m not sure to what your “really” refers, will you clarify? When you refer to “lack of expertise”, do you mean graduating high schoolers or professors with much more education?
I was typing a much longer post to attempt to cover all of the possibilities, but it seems silly to subject you all to a thread hijack in order to answer a question when I’m not reallly sure what’s being asked.
Doh! (Sorry to An Gadai for the hijack as well)
Specifically, I was thinking of this part:
So pretty much, I was wondering if you could provide more detail on that, since it sounds like the reasons are more complicated than the ones that I listed briefly in my original response.
I’ve never been able to get the straight dope on that either. This pronoun duplication is mentioned in a substantial number of textbooks, particularly in Tom Humphries’ introductory texts, which are heavily used at community colleges. However, I’ve never seen a native signer use this construct, and I don’t think it’s mentioned in the Gallaudet Green Books, which I’ve always held to be the most authoritative source on the matter (but I’ll look later to verify this). This has been pestering me for years, and I’ve never found a satisfactory answer to the question, despite a fair amount of effort on my part to do so. There might be a graduate thesis in this for anybody who wants to tackle it.
Yesterday the instructor who is indeed Deaf, told me that the final “I” in “No I not student I” serves to mark the end of the sentence.
Personally, I think they get together at random intervals and change stuff to confuse we dumb hearing folks.
The 3rd/4th grade reading level is what teachers are taught in “teacher school” to expect of their students.
I think the way that teachers are trained has a lot to do with it. Potential teachers take all kinds of classes about deafness–causes, phonetics, anatomy & physiology as it relates to speech and hearing, sign, Deaf Culture–the list goes on! All useful information, but students in my college took one “content” or “methods” class in each subject except math which had two classes. These classes were all geared toward teaching elementary school. So, we had teachers who know all about deafness, but nothing about content and very little about how to teach it. What this led to was teachers that didn’t know what they were teaching.
I had an acquaintance who graduated a year before I did. She fairly quickly got a job teaching English at the state Deaf school because another teacher was out long-term. The problem was she had to teach high school grammar, and she didn’t even know the content she had to teach. She went to a mutual friend’s house in a panic because she had to teach this stuff the next day, so we had to tutor her.
There are other reasons: lack of funding, lack of understanding of what deaf/Deaf students need in a classroom, lack of equipment to make learning easier (which could relate to funding and understanding), but I think this is a big reason–especially in deaf schools. I don’t think it’s as much of an issue for mainstreamed/included kids because they do have teachers with content knowledge. In these cases, the deaf ed teacher comes in to spend an hour or so a week with the child.
Lizardling–as a deaf/hard of hearing person who has been through the educational system, what do you think? What did you think of the way things were presented at Gallaudet?
Thanks for providing the look into the system from the educator’s point of view. I’ve only seen it from the other side of the desk, so to speak.
I was one of those mainstreamed kids. I don’t know about Deaf Ed specifically – what do they do in a mainstream situation, tutor the kid? I didn’t have any help aside from interpreters for classes. This would’ve been in the early 80s, by the way.
That said, I didn’t fit in at Gallaudet as a visiting student, someone who wasn’t fluent in ASL – ‘only’ PSE, and very reserved to boot. To put it mildly, I felt like the alien in their midst. From what I saw of the academic culture at Gally, it was WAY different from what I was used to. I’d known that the academics wouldn’t be the same going in, but what I hadn’t expected was *how * different they would be.
Classes, like you said, had a ton of focus on ‘how to learn’ basic skills for the students at a ‘handholding’ level. Not a lot of focus on the actual material, and it certainly seemed to be at or under the level of the non-AP classes I’d had in high school. This might be my bias speaking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the low academic expectations contributed to the noticeable student apathy and general half-assedness I saw. No real expectations, so why bother blowing them out of the water?
Honestly, the deaf educational system’s got a lot to answer for. By this point with the technological advances we’ve got, I have to seriously think that it’s better for deaf students to just go mainstream so that they can get good academic support.