Teacher Training, Bilingual

In American education, there has been a proliferation of deaf children, many who are bilinguals attending public schools and schools for the deaf. Unfortunately, because of hundreds of years of audism in America that any language other than English is considered inferior, politicians and educators rarely instill bilingualism or multilingualism in children and adults. The presence of linguicism, which is a form of prejudice based on language in schools, magnifies the plight of deaf bilingual children. Their plight consists of the experience of linguistic and cultural oppression in the realm of academics and in the community.

Too often, most deaf bilingual children struggle academically due to inappropriate academic and linguistic alignments. This is a significant factor in leading deaf children to drop out of school, or more often than not, finish school and lead lives of poverty. Since the 1980s, there has been a big push for a standardized education requiring public schools to adopt state standards that are monolingual and to administer standardized tests in English. In the field of Deaf education, there has been a very strong monolingual push in oralism and/or simultaneous communication. Events such as the Milan resolution in 1880 represent the white and middle-class framing in the development of curriculum, instruction, and assessment for public education and deaf education. Due to the lens in which education functions from this blueprint, standards-based curriculum and instruction do not succeed in addressing the needs of students who are not proficient in English, coupled with the fact that standards-based tests do not accurately measure their academic abilities. As a result, monolingual public schools and schools for the Deaf fail to adequately educate hearing and deaf students who are bilingual, and these students graduate ill-prepared for life after high school. Contrary to the popular American monolingual belief, schools do have a social responsibility in the provision of curriculum aligned in the teaching pedagogy of bilingual students.

However, the education of deaf bilinguals is the focus of this chapter. To effectively teach deaf students, preservice and inservice teachers need training in the bilingual education pedagogy. In 2002, as statistics demonstrate, approximately two out of 46 preservice teacher training programs at the university level prepared teachers-in-training in pedagogy of Deaf education that is bilingual. In response to the paucity of preservice teacher preparation programs addressing bilingual teaching pedagogy, Stephen Nover, of the Center for ASL/English Bilingual Education and Research, began the ASL-English bilingual professional development as an inservice for practicing teachers, where the practicing teachers meet every week for two hours, do their weekly readings and Guided Reflections, and complete a project every semester. For two years, in the process of critical pedagogy [Page 942]transformation, the teachers would “name” traditional beliefs, critically and collaboratively “reflect” upon them, and then “act” to implement effective practices of bilingual/English as a second language (ESL) instruction that enhance the achievement of Deaf students in all academic classes.

On the question of language acquisition and development, studies demonstrate that it takes a person two years to acquire a social language. It takes four to seven years to develop an academic language. The development of a second language is wholly dependent upon successful development of the original language. This is known as the interdependent hypothesis, as demonstrated by Baker and Cummins. One or two years in a special English instruction program, where the students leave behind their native language and submerge themselves in the learning of English, does not even tackle the bilingual students’ language acquisition and development in English. This becomes teachers’ ethical and moral responsibility to provide a bilingual education in the form of an additive maintenance model. Such a model calls for an education platform in which students are educated bilingually; using the native language (L1) and English as a second language (L2) throughout the entire duration of a K–12 academic program.

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