American Sign Language

A Brief History of Deaf Education

The formal education of deaf students in America began in 1817 with the establishment of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. The mode of instruction was Signed English, and it was an attempt to represent the structure and syntax of English on the hands in a visual modality with the hope that if deaf students had access to the structure of English, then they could acquire it. The acquisition of the conversational form of English would serve as the basis for later academic achievement (e.g., reading and writing English). This early form of Signed English relied on Signed French because early American instruction was borrowed from the French model. Thus, the first language of instruction in America was modified Signed French with some invented signs to represent parts of English, for example, gender, articles, and prepositions.

By 1835, the dominant language of instruction in schools for the deaf was ASL. Signed English was no longer popular because it was not the natural language of the deaf themselves. Moreover, there was little emphasis on English articulation or speech production. These changes led to an increase in the number of deaf teachers and deaf faculty, and by 1858 more than 40% of teachers of deaf students were deaf themselves. This situation was soon to change. The next 100 years would be dominated by the oral methods of language instruction in which deaf students were taught to read lips and to speak. The impetus for this approach grew out of several factors. First, the Europeans demonstrated success with oral methods. Later on, the Americans would discover that European languages (e.g., German) were in general more visible to speech readers because many of their sounds are made near the front of the mouth whereas many of the sounds of English are made toward the rear of the mouth and thus are not visible.

Second, there was a growing belief that sign language (i.e., ASL) would interfere with the development of oral skills. A notable advocate of the oral approach was Alexander Graham Bell, who believed not only that sign language would interfere with oral skills, but also that sign language was ideographic and thus less abstract than spoken English. Because sign language was less abstract than English, it would limit the intellectual development of deaf students. Moreover, Bell wanted to forbid the marriage of deaf people to hearing people and to eliminate deaf teachers in the deaf education system.

...