Shakespeare in ASL

[Scott or Pafra Catledge]

Probably one reason that the alleged myth persists is that chairs of graduate programs in Deaf Education give it to their graduate students as an acknowledged fact of life.

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> For some reason, this 3rd grade level myth persists; I've heard it from my
> undergrads in both Education and Hearing and Speech.  According to one
> source (G. Yule, _The Study of Language_, 1996), Signed English, SEE, and
> oralism were encouraged instead of ASL because they were easier for hearing
> parents and others to learn, seemed more like "real language," and prepared
> students to read and write English--despite the fact that they take much
> longer to produce and interpret and therefore in practice result in
> incomplete or imprecise utterances.  That ASL might be a better and more
> efficient primary language, with written English taught as a second
> language (as Dennis implies below), has apparently been only recently
> understood by educators, though the deaf community has known this for a
> long time.
>
>
> At 05:53 PM 7/6/99 -0700, you wrote:
> >In Deaf Ed classes, we studied the basics of ASL, Signed English, and
> Signing Exact English.  Of these, only SEE [has] morphology, but not even
> it made a pretense of phonology,, much less phonetics.  All the languages
> studied had syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, of course.  The morphology
> of ASL seems more complex than English to the naive English learner because
> ASL is a "dialect" from French, not English.  I have yet to hear an
> explanation of why students who learn ASL are such low achievers when the
> few students who are fortunate enough to learn SEE do as well as if not
> better than their hearing classmates.  Unfortunately, it is politically
> incorrect to research such a point, and we are left with only anecdotes.
> >
> >----------
> >> One can only hope that the gist of this does not lie in the direction which
> >> I first understood. ASL, of course, is a fully developed, complex human
> >> language (with a phonetics, phonology, morphology [much more complex than
> >> English], syntax, semantics, and pragamtics). The idea that it is
> >> Tonto/Tarzan talk is simply a misunderstanding of the phrase "sign
> >> language."
> >>
> >> Further, the idea that learning it (and becoming proficient in it) would
> >> "retard' one's ability to read and/or write English is unfounded (similar,
> >> in fact, to the popular notion that children's acquisition of a second
> >> language might retard their advancement in their first or, more insidious,
> >> that continued development in their first might retard their acquisition of
> >> a second, the apparent foundation of "English Only" and anti-bilingual
> >> education measures roundly condemned by every responsible professional
> >> linguistics organization (e.g., LSA, AAAL).
> >>
> >> dInIs
> >>
> >> PS: One nice thing (among many others) about being from the South Midland
> >> (i.e., Hillbilly) area is that nobody wants to translate Shakespeare into
> >> our variety, since the popular press has told us that us shit-kickers
> >> already speak Elizabethan English.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> >Just pretend that you are Tonto/Tarzan.  Why do you think that deaf
> students
> >> >graduate with an average achievement level of 3rd grade, as I was told
> in my
> >> >graduate Deaf Ed classes at UNF.
> >> >
> >> >----------
> >> >> Is anyone familiar with translation of dramatic works into American Sign
> >> >> Language?  I am assisting a dramatist who is in the process of
> translating
> >> >> _Twelfth Night_ into ASL and I am looking for works on translation
> and use
> >> >> of ASL in drama.
> >> >>
> >> >> If you're interested, the website for this project can be found at:
> >> >>
> >> >> www.yale.edu/asl12night
> >>
> >> Dennis R. Preston
> >> Department of Linguistics and Languages
> >> Michigan State University
> >> East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
> >> preston at pilot.msu.edu
> >> Office: (517)353-0740
> >> Fax: (517)432-2736
> >