Sign language plays key role in d/Deaf children’s education, study shows

Ensuring d/Deaf children become bilingual in sign language and English should be a key priority for policymakers and teachers because this plays an important role in their education, a new study says.

Curriculum and instruction in deaf education should provide opportunities for children to actively use sign language in schools.

BSL should be used as part of children’s spoken and written language development, particularly considering its significance for reading development. The study shows how skills transfer from sign language to support a wide range of spoken and written language abilities.

There are many debates on how to best educate d/Deaf students for success in schools. Growing numbers of d/Deaf children are now educated in mainstream schools, where they will not get the same exposure to BSL.

The systematic review, of 70 studies, allowed researchers to identify close relationships between many “competencies” of sign language and spoken and written language. The sign language competences analysed in that review included phonological awareness, fingerspelling, lexico-semantic knowledge, grammatical knowledge, sign language comprehension, sign language production, and general proficiency. The spoken and written language competences included phonological awareness, word reading, lexico-semantic knowledge, grammatical knowledge, reading comprehension, spoken and written language production, and general proficiency.

The systematic review, by Dongbo Zhang and Hannah Anglin-Jaffe from the University of Exeter and Junhui Yang from the University of Central Lancashire, is published in Review of Education, a journal of the British Educational Research Association. The 70 studies were conducted in 14 countries, but about 60 per cent were conducted in the United States. They involved 14 sign languages and 8 spoken languages.

Researchers coded 202 cross-linguistic correlations – relationships between sign language competences and competences in spoken and written language.

The correlations were positive and statistically significant for all cross-linguistic relationships. The strength of the correlations, however, varied. For example, the highest correlation was between fingerspelling and word reading. The lowest correlation was between sign language phonological awareness and reading comprehension.

For the correlation between sign language and reading comprehension, the effect was stronger in children in bilingual programmes and schools.

Professor Zhang said: “We already know children’s home language plays a key role in helping them to read and learn. We have found the skills d/Deaf children have when using BSL help them in the same way. This means an English-only approach to learning may not be best for them.

“It’s important to nurture their bilingualism, and the place of sign language in the curriculum should be emphasised by policymakers.”

Dr Anglin-Jaffe said: “We know there used to be a lot more support for bilingualism for d/Deaf children than there is now. This is evidence of the academic, emotional and linguistic benefits of sign language.

“It’s important for deaf children to be exposed to BSL and see their peers, teachers and parents using it. This may not be happening in mainstream schools.”

Dr Yang said: “Sign language is an asset for d/Deaf students. Sign bilingualism means there are a lot of linguistic resources that benefit their academic learning. These resources also promote translanguaging and have broader significance for d/Deaf people.”

Yang, herself being Deaf, uses multiple sign languages and spoken languages. She teaches Sign Linguistics, Sign and Society and BSL courses