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Most of what we have said so far, points us in the direction of measuring the extent of someone’s bilingualism. We need to know how well Deaf children are doing in English and how well they are doing in sign. We need to know if the teaching of a hearing class is going well and the students are learning to the right level. But it is also important to know how bilingual Deaf people are. Are the members of the Deaf community bilingual or monolingual? You could stop and write down your thoughts on this point. What percentage of the Deaf community do you believe to be bilingual in sign and speech? What percentage are bilingual in sign and written English? How can you decide on this? You could discuss this with another student or in a small group. There are many answers which might be given here. Most of them will have to tackle a prior question - how big is the Deaf community? This is not easy to answer because it is a circular question. The size of the Deaf community[1] is determined by the number of people who are sign language users. We can be quite accurate in our measurement of spoken language or written language, but how should we measure sign? The answer is that we cannot - at least, not yet.. The situation of Deaf people in this is the same as that of hearing people who use a minority language. A census has to be carried out and questions about language have to be asked. Page 20-21 of Baker gives an example for Spanish, but we could put it in sign for deaf children. You can stop and complete the next table for yourself when you are living at your home address. Which language do you use with the following people?
Again you can share this with another student and discuss the different patterns which you have. You will also have to turn the questions around and ask about how the other person addresses you. Baker mentions some of the problems in this “scale” because of what people feel they should answer. This means that if a hearing teacher asks a Deaf child to fill in the form, he or she will get a different set of answers to that of a Deaf friend asking another deaf person. (There is quite a lot of support for these differences - you should refer to the Sociolinguistics course). However, it is a very important exercise to determine the extent of bilingualism in a population. We will discuss the issue of Deaf bilingualism in the community and why it might be important to determine it in this way. Measuring Language Competence Baker deals
with this topic in chapter 2, but it is only a brief glimpse into the area of
measurement. For sign teaching this is a
major issue; it is also vital for education,
where we need to know how well Deaf children can achieve in English and in sign. This course cannot cover this in enough depth and
to follow it up you will need to look in some of the other texts in this field.
[1] There are not many good estimates of the size of
the community. It depends on which people you
wish to include. If we take only
Deaf people
who have been to a special school or Unit, then the number is between 20,000 and 25,000. If we include friends, family, deaf people who
became Deaf later, then the figure could go up to about 50,000. |
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