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<h1>American sign language and English language learners: New linguistic research supports the need for policy changes</h1>
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June 11, 2018, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.linguisticsociety.org/">Linguistic Society of America</a>
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Credit: CC0 Public Domain
</figcaption></figure><p>A new study of the educational needs of
students who are native users of American Sign Language (ASL) shows
glaring disparities in their treatment by the U.S Department of
Education. The article, "If you use ASL, should you study ESL?
Limitations of a modality-b(i)ased policy", by Elena Koulidobrova
(Central Connecticut State University), Marlon Kunze (Gallaudet
University) and Hannah Dostal (University of Connecticut), will be
published in the June, 2018 issue of the scholarly journal <i>Language</i>.
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</div> <p>The US legal
system offers various protections to children for whom English is an
additional language, such as access to focused English instruction to
facilitate mastery of the academic curriculum. However, these laws do
not protect all multilingual students in the US. One population of
bilingual students has been systematically excluded from these
protections are those whose <a href="https://medicalxpress.com/tags/native+language/" rel="tag" class="gmail-textTag">native language</a>
is ASL. The authors' research shows that ASL has long been considered a
system of communication for people with hearing needs and viewed
through the prism of disability as opposed to multilingualism. However,
as decades of linguistic research have revealed, ASL is a language in
its own right and independent from English; it is the primary language
of the Deaf community in the US, but there are also many members of the
ASL community who are not deaf. Yet, the conflation between the lack of
hearing and language drives the linguistic, as well as educational <a href="https://medicalxpress.com/tags/policy/" rel="tag" class="gmail-textTag">policy</a>, of the US government.</p>
<p>Among the most serious ramifications of the exclusion of ASL speakers
from the legal policies on multilingual education is that no data has
ever been systematically collected on users of ASL who have no
disabilities: we simply do not know with certainty how many typically
developing children in the US school system have ASL as a native
language. This article systematically demonstrates that there are
different kinds of "ASL native" groups, and each is truly multilingual
in all the ways which have by now become familiar as a result of
previous linguistic research with individuals who speak other languages.
Schools and educators understand the need to separate issues of
language impairment from language development so that ASL speakers are
able to receive appropriate linguistic support. The authors propose
explicit programmatic curricular suggestions, but more importantly, they
call for a change in policy that would dismantle the conflation between
language and disability and, therefore, finally take the US closer to
equity for children whose native language is a sign <a href="https://medicalxpress.com/tags/language/" rel="tag" class="gmail-textTag">language</a>.
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<a href="https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-american-language-english-learners-linguistic.html#" id="gmail-inl-rel-href"><img class="gmail-toolsicon gmail-ic-rel" src="https://b98584f181.site.internapcdn.net/tmpl/v5/img/1x1.gif" alt="" width="14" height="16"></a>
<b>Explore further:</b>
<a href="https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-03-esl-students-special-language.html">ESL students with special needs fail to get language instruction, study finds</a>
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<b>More information:</b>
A pre-print version of the article may be found at: <a href="https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/e2_94.2Koulidobrova.pdf">https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/e2_94.2Koulidobrova.pdf</a> .
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<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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