The Big Four or is it Five?

In order to begin to try to find out what we mean by bilingualism, or to answer the question: how bilingual do you have to be?, we will begin to break down some of the components of language use.

There are four main abilities which are discussed in languages:

 These language abilities are the usual ones we think of when we examine English or French or other spoken languages.   We can say for example that someone is good on receptive skills in French speech but poor in productive - this is very common.   It means that a person is able to understand what French people say and is able to read books in French;  but has great difficulty in talking to a group of French people.  The person may not be able to write a letter in French.

This is a very natural situation for language learning but we also have to be able to apply it to the way in which hearing people learn to sign.  There is also something which is quite different about bilingualism in sign which is shown by using this table.  Can you suggest what it is?

There are some missing cells.  There is no literacy in sign at present so people cannot learn to read sign as you might read a book[1].  This makes the bilinguality of deaf people rather different.

This means that there could be different goals for a deaf child who is to be bilingual.  We can draw the same table for a hearing person who is trying to be bilingual in sign and English.

These sorts of differences are very important in understanding what you have to teach hearing people if your are a sign teacher and what you have to teach a deaf child if you are a teacher of the Deaf in a bilingual programme.  The language ability can be further sub-divided to give more information about the way the language is learned.  Baker suggests these categories and we could try to apply them to someone who is training to be an interpreter (see Table 1.1 below).

Although we sometimes believe that interpreters have all the language abilities already available because they can sign and speak, the likelihood that the tutors have to work in all these areas of ability.  We need to develop methods of assessing each ability.  This is not a trivial task for a new language.  Similar issues apply to Deaf children in school.  This framework is very important for us to retain as we move through bilingualism within this course.

Table 1.1: Extending the Language Areas for bilinguals

In the last heading, there was a question about the fifth ability?

This is sometimes taken to mean a higher level where the person understands how the language works.  This is the distinction between the BSL course and the Sign Linguistics course.  The first is about the abilities which appear in the tables and the second concerns the knowledge of how to use the language and its internal structure.  It may be the ability to think in both languages.

Back to MLEDC homepage
This page was last modified January 29, 2007
jim.kyle@bris.ac.uk