Saulnier Karen Luczak - Signing

As its name suggests Signing is designed to start you and your child or student on the way to proficiency in Signed English. For those of you who work with or teach very limited learners, this book may be the whole journey. Its contents may be enough, indeed more than enough, for your needs. However, those of you who deal with otherwise unimpaired deaf children or adults will surely need to continue on to the other resources or tools that are available in the Signed English series.

In either case, this book is a first course for those people, especially parents, who need to teach and/or interact with hearing-impaired people in English mode.

Children learn English from others. They learn from what they hear and see. If their hearing is impaired, they will have to depend more on what they see than the hearing child. Therefore, a hearing-impaired child can learn English through a combination of (a) hearing some of the spoken words (with or without the aid of amplification), (b) reading lips, and/or (c) seeing some manual language symbols. Accordingly, Signed English is a manual English system designed to be used with speech.

It is a semantic system in which the signs, although largely taken from American Sign Language (ASL), represent the meanings of words found in standard English dictionaries. They do not represent the spelling or the sound of those words. Although Signed English is by far the simplest manual English system in general use, it is not easy to learn nor is it necessarily the most comfortable way to communicate manually. For that matter, standard English is not necessarily the most comfortable way to speak; yet it is an essential tool for educational and economic achievement and advancement. You may wonder why a manual English system is more useful for teaching and learning English than American Sign Language. These are the reasons.

American Sign Language has a different structure or syntax than English. Therefore, for all practical purposes, it is not possible to speak syntactically correct English sentences and use ASL at the same time. Further, since only about three percent of hearing-impaired children have two hearing-impaired parents, the language of the home is most often English. It is easier for parents to learn a manual English system than it is to learn ASL. Finally, ASL has no widely accepted writing system.

Signed English serves two basic purposes. Signed English serves two basic purposes.

First, it is a model of the English language. Second, it is used to communicate information between people. When it first becomes known that the child has a hearing impairment, it is very important that the adult serve as a language model while communicating information. Later, when the child is older and has mastered language patterns, it is usually acceptable to concentrate on exchanging information. At that time the language modeling function becomes less important. In educational settings, it is probably always desirable for the teacher to remain a model.

Let us talk further about some of the implications of the two basic purposes of Signed English. Because Signed English should be used with speech, the signs are not the only source of information. Depending upon the degree of hearing loss and the quality of amplification used, hearing-impaired children also receive some information from the actual sounds of speech. Further, they receive some information from the shape of the lips as the speaker forms his or her words. Indeed, they also receive information from the eyes, eyebrows, and a host of other small clues. The point being made is a simple one: A manual English system is a second, parallel and redundant model of English for the hearing-impaired child.