Sign Language Teaching, History of

American Sign Language (ASL) is accepted by colleges and universities and has been accepted in fulfillment of the modern/foreign language requirements at the high school, bachelor’s, and master’s levels in schools and states across the United States. ASL classes are also offered in elementary and middle schools.

Teaching sign language is a relatively new phenomenon compared to the teaching of other foreign or modern languages. Prior to the 1960s, many members of the Deaf community had the idea that their sign language was based on the spoken language used in their home community. At that time, sign language was taught strictly in parallel with the words from the spoken language. Many sign language classes were provided on a voluntary basis through Deaf community organizations and churches for the Deaf. The widely used sign language dictionary in the classes was A Basic Course in Manual Communication published by National Association of the Deaf in 1970, which provided a list of English words with accompanying illustrations of signs for the words. Prior to the 1980s, the classes often were taught by CODAs (children of Deaf adults), interpreters, and hearing teachers of Deaf students. During this era, teachers relied heavily on using spoken [Page 855]English to teach new signs and on vocabulary drills without much attention to grammatical structure or communicative behaviors. Beginning in the 1980s, signed language instruction changed to being offered as formal courses taken for credit in an academic setting with qualified sign language teachers who use signed language to introduce lexical signs, grammatical structures, and culture of Deaf people.

In the United States, linguistic research on sign language in the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for recognition of the Deaf community’s sign language as a legitimate language that is distinctive from spoken language’s grammar, and further to use the name “American Sign Language (ASL)” for the sign language used by the Deaf community members in the United States and Canada. This led to many states giving recognition to ASL as the official language of the Deaf community, and to provide ASL classes for credit in academic settings, beginning with the colleges and universities and then in the K–12 schools. The Modern Language Association reported that the number of students taking ASL classes increased 15.5 percent from 2006 to 2009 and 19 percent from 2009 to 2013, and that ASL is the third most common foreign language in the United States.